Every year on March 14, mathematicians, students, and pie-lovers around the world pause to celebrate Pi. This irrational and transcendental number shows up everywhere, from the circumference of a pizza to the orbital paths of planets. This year, while 8th grade focused on the Operetta, the rest of our Middle School students celebrated Pi Day - March 14 - with activities that encouraged hands-on, thought-provoking, and occasionally delicious explorations of Pi. 

A Pi Exploration Web Quest: What Did Students Discover?

The day began with students completing a Pi Exploration web quest, created by 5th grade teacher, Ms. Amend. This guided investigation took them across the internet in search of facts, jokes, and a few surprises about the world’s most famous constant. The results were a mix of genuine mathematical curiosity and unmistakable middle school wit. 

One of the first tasks was for each student to discover which digit position of Pi contains their own birthday, using the site mypiday.com. The results varied widely: the earliest birthday appeared as early as the 8,096th digit, while one didn’t show up until the 2,045,688th, a number so large it practically feels infinite. The exercise gave each student a personal connection to Pi’s decimal expansion and sparked lively conversations about just how far the digits go.

When asked which celebrity shares a birthday with Pi Day, the class landed on two crowd favorites: Steph Curry and Simone Biles. A few students dug a little deeper and discovered that Albert Einstein was also born on March 14, a revelation that inspired appropriate awe. Nearly every student correctly identified San Francisco as the birthplace of Pi Day, connecting it to the holiday’s origin at the Exploratorium in 1988.

The video portion of the quest produced a wide range of takeaways. Several students focused on the mathematical definition, noting that “Pi is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter.” Others highlighted historical facts such as the earliest reference to Pi appearing in ancient Egypt around 1650 BCE or the first formal celebration of Pi Day celebrated in 1988. One standout student shared that someone has calculated Pi to 2.7 trillion decimal places, a fact that impressed the entire class.

The joke-matching section paired punchlines like “Pi-thon” and “Magnum Pi” with their setups. This showed that most students were reading the humor logically rather than guessing, a small but telling sign of mathematical thinking at work. When asked about their favorite kind of pie, the responses were wonderfully personal; pumpkin led the pack with apple, pecan, key lime, cookies and cream, and “my mom’s blueberry pie” all making the list.

In the Classroom: Three Grades and Three Angles on Pi

Fifth Grade and The Pi Day Challenge.

Beyond the web quest, 5th graders also contributed to the “Pi Day Challenge,” brainstorming equations that use any mathematical operations with the digits 3, 1, and 4. The hunt for equations using consecutive number sets proved especially engaging, turning arithmetic into a puzzle hunt where creativity and mathematical fluency fed each other.

Sixth Grade’s Empirical Approach.

Armed with rulers and circular objects of all sizes, students measured the circumference and diameter of each item and then calculated the ratio. As their measurements accumulated and the class averaged the results, something remarkable happened: the average hovered around 3.14. The lesson drove home what ancient mathematicians discovered thousands of years ago, that this ratio is constant, regardless of the size of the circle.

Adding a rich interdisciplinary layer, 6th-grade students also read and discussed the Talmud, Tractate 7b–8a, which addresses the problem of how wide a sukkah should be to seat 12 people along the circumference.

This relies on a 3:1 ratio to determine the appropriate dimensions. The ancient text offered a fascinating window into how Jewish scholars grappled with geometric reasoning millennia before modern mathematics.

Seventh Grade: Where Does Pi Actually Come From?

Seventh graders brought their characteristic curiosity to Pi Day through puzzles and deeper conceptual questions. While the Pi puzzles were a crowd-pleaser, what really sparked discussion was the more fundamental question: what exactly is Pi doing in the formula for the area of a circle and where does it come from? Students wrestled with the geometric reasoning behind A = πr² rather than simply applying it.

Another topic that captivated the class was the fraction 22/7. Students explored why it serves as a useful approximation of Pi in some contexts but falls short in others providing a perfect entry point into the idea of rational approximations for irrational numbers and why mathematicians need to be precise about when “good enough” actually is good enough.

A School-Wide Celebration of the Wonders of Mathematics

From 5th-grade equation challenges and celebrity birthday research to 7th-grade debates about irrational numbers, Pi Day at Bernard Zell was a reminder that mathematics is not just a set of procedures to memorize but a living, breathing conversation between ideas, generations, and cultures. Whether measuring a coffee can, decoding a Talmudic passage, tracking down Albert Einstein’s birthday, or wondering why a simple circle produces a number that goes on forever, our students showed up as mathematicians.

When the dust settled, pumpkin was the favorite pie, with apple a close second.