"Bye, bye, Miss American Pi"

As you all should know, today was pi day. Every year, the math department at BYU puts on a great party to celebrate (complete with a countdown to 1:59:26pm), but without fail, I have had class. This year was different. After I finished substituting in an ensemble for a pep band friend (though I seem to have become a permanent fixture in this class), I headed out to Brigham Square to find out how the math people party.

It was great fun, really. Sometimes I forget how horribly nerdy I am, but it's times like this that it's really brought into sharp focus. I really do quite like math people. There was music playing in the background the whole time. At one point, "American Pie" came on. Once it got to the chorus, the emcee started a little shuffle dance, and then said, "...pi," right in time with the music. I started laughing, and he noticed. He grinned like it was so clever. Perhaps it was.

Other highlights of the party include:

-Getting a math pencil from a Plinko game.

-Getting REALLY close to solving the pi day sudoku. (perhaps I'll have to scan this in; it's kind of funky)

-Learning about Buffon's Needle, which is an interesting idea of how to estimate pi. The math students were conducting trials and entering the numbers into the computer to find the estimate (click the link for more complicated info). We had an error of 0.022 for most of the time I was watching, though it was as high as .032 and as low as .015. Watching the number change as new trials were entered in was almost as interesting as a sports game. But not quite.

-Seeing the math professors run around spraying people with silly string after we hit pi time in the countdown. Professors are fun.

-Standing next to the one and only Sam Dittmer (if you don't know who he is, watch the video). If I was braver, I would've said something... but I'm not. Maybe some day. I kind of have a crush on him--the admiring from afar kind. Math people are too easy to fall for.