Circle the wagons: it’s Pi Day
The picture says it all: it’s another Pi Day celebration at Greenhills. Each year during the Middle School Pi Day celebration – held as near as possible to March 14, or 3/14 – one lucky Greenhills student gets to administer a “pi” to the face of the teacher of his or her choice. The price of admission for the honor is memorizing more digits of pi than anybody else in the school.
This year–which is considered a “pi-centennial,” as the year “15” actually takes the number out two more decimal places, to 3.1415–that feat was accomplished by 6th grader Annie Wang, who correctly recalled the first TWO HUNDRED AND TEN digits of the number. (She has a ways to go yet, however: while the exact number of pi remains unknown, it has been calculated to more than 200 million places.)
For her victim, Annie chose Greenhills art teacher Nicole Burroughs, who accepted the role—and bombardment by two Cool Whip pies—with remarkable good grace.
Students at the assembly also enjoyed a pi-based game of Jeopardy, and an impressive array of academic awards earned by Greenhills math students this year.
Middle schoolers weren’t the only ones celebrating the day. A pair of Greenhills alums, 1991 classmates Kristi McClamroch and Christina Empedocles, created “Celebrating the Pi-Centennial: Pi in Pop Culture.” The two, co-founders of Crux Information Design in San Francisco, took BC-Calculus together with Arleen Schwartz, who fostered in them a lifelong love of pi and whose namesake scholarship fund is supported by friends of Greenhills. They created the graphic in her honor.
