By Pup Horst

tl;dr Send your Pi-kus to blogs@maa.org by March 3, 2025.

Pi Day 2025 is almost here! Join Math Values as we celebrate with Pi-kus!

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14—that’s 3/14 or 3.14 (i.e. approximately π) in places that list the month before the day. This year, we at Math Values would like to celebrate with community-written Pi-kus: short-form poems based on the Haiku and the number π.

Haikus are traditional Japanese poems consisting of three lines. The syllable count for each line is 5-7-5 respectively. For instance:

Haikus are so great!

I’m not very good at them,

But I still love them!

That’s 5 syllables followed by 7 syllables followed by 5 more.

(Please note: This is a vast simplification of the Haiku form; however, this zeroth-order approximation will be sufficient for now.)

A Pi-ku is also a poem consisting of three lines, but this time the syllables count for each line is 3-1-4 respectively, as in 3.14, π!  For instance:

I really

Love

Mathematics!

That’s 3 syllables followed by 1 syllable followed by 4 more.

In celebration of Pi Day, we invite our readers to try writing your own Pi-kus! They can overtly be about math, or subtly about math, or not about math at all. Send your Pi-kus to blogs@maa.org by March 3, 2025, and we’ll compile them into a community-wide celebratory post for Pi Day!