Have a good time the Mathematical Marvel With Stellar Math Issues

Pi Day is an annual celebration commemorating the mathematical fixed π (pi). It’s noticed on March 14th (3/14) because the first three digits of pi are 3.14. Pi Day was first formally acknowledged by the US Home of Representatives in 2009, and has since been celebrated by math lovers, educators, and college students all over the world.

Pi Day is a day for folks to have a good time and recognize the significance of pi in our lives, and is commonly marked by numerous occasions and actions corresponding to pie-eating contests, pi recitation competitions, and lectures on the historical past and significance of pi. Some folks additionally use Pi Day as a possibility to boost consciousness in regards to the significance of math and science training.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory celebrates the mathematical marvel with a set of problems involving real space missions.

Pi Day is the annual tribute to the mathematical constant pi, whose infinite number of decimals is usually rounded to 3.14. So what better day to celebrate than March 14? To find pi, aka the Greek letter p, you simply divide any circle’s circumference by its diameter. It’s a ratio that’s indispensable to NASA missions studying Earth, Mars, and beyond.

This Pi Day marks the 10th year that the Education Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has celebrated this wondrously useful number with the agency’s Pi Day Challenge. Students can put their math mettle to the test to solve real problems faced by NASA scientists and engineers.

In honor of the mathematical constant pi – and its many uses in space exploration – the annual NASA Pi Day Challenge offers four math problems involving real NASA missions and science.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Using pi to tackle this quartet of problems, students can:

Answers to all four challenge questions will be available on March 15.

The NASA Pi Day Challenge is accompanied by other pi-related resources for educators, K-12 students, and parents, including lessons and teachable moments, articles, downloadable posters, and illustrated web/mobile backgrounds. More than 30 puzzlers from previous challenges are also available.

Pi is a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is a non-repeating and non-terminating number that has been calculated to trillions of digits, but is commonly approximated to 3.14. Pi is used in many fields, including mathematics, physics, engineering, and statistics, and has numerous applications in everyday life such as in the design of buildings, the calculation of distances in navigation, and in the measurement of circles and spheres.