What you’ll learn:
- What is Pi Day?
- What is E Day?
- What is Mole Day?
It’s Pi Day. Of course, engineers celebrate it.
It's been a while since I saw a Pi Day race at Georgia Tech. This is an annual 3.14-mile (5K) race that Georgia Tech students can participate and run in. The annual event for has gone on for ages. This year was Pi Day 5K: Pin the the Sky (see figure).
Force-Fitting Numbers to the Calendar
Who doesn’t like a celebration?
Governments and organizations can arbitrarily pick a day to celebrate something. Sometimes they finagle with the date and idea like President’s Day, which is still held on Washington’s Birthday.
Pi Day, on the other hand, is related to a numerical value. It's celebrated on March 14, which sort of matches the first three digits of pi—an irrational mathematical constant that we love to run rings around. The first few digits are: 3.14159265358979323846. Of course, only 3.14 are used to mark Pi Day.
From Pi to E Day
February 7th has been designated E Day. So what is E Day? Should it really be Euler’s Day?
That ubiquitous "e" is another mathematical constant dubbed Euler’s number, after the Swiss mathematician, Leanhard Euler.
The value is approximately 2.71828. You can figure out the value by solving eiπ + 1 = 0. Of course, π sneaks in there as well, so maybe we could start the celebration a 3.14 am.
E Day only snarfs the first two digits, so it was 2/7/2025 this year.
Why Mole Day?
This is another approximation. Avogardo’s constant is about 6.022 x 10²³. Mole day is June 2nd, or is it?
Seems chemistry students would rather celebrate between 6:02 am and 6:02 pm on October 23.
“Mole Day originated from a celebration by educator Margaret Christoph. She wrote an article about her experiences in The Science Teacher in the 1980s. Inspired by this article, Maurice Oehler, a high school chemistry teacher from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, founded the National Mole Day Foundation (NMDF) on May 15, 1991.”—Wikipedia
Ok, I grabbed a bit from Wikipedia, but it saved time.
Any way you stretch it, it's a way for engineers and scientists to celebrate something the rest of the world doesn’t have a clue about. So, enjoy Pi Day and take a run if you have time and the inclination.
