More Stimulus: Congress Recognizes Pi Day

March 17, 2009

On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 391-10 to recognize 3/14 officially as Pi Day. Politico reported that engineering and technology companies lent muscle to the House effort.

Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), who managed the bill for the House Science Committee, asked the nation's students and teachers "to go out and have fun around Pi Day."

"I’m kind of geeked up about it," Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) told Politico. "It's crazy, but I'm a whole lot more excited about that than congratulating the winner of last year's Rose Bowl."

"I have been fascinated by pi since I was a kid," Baird claimed. "It blows my mind. It's lovely. The fact that it's sort of this infinite number. I just think it's this magical thing."

"There's a real beauty to mathematics," he added.

Not everyone joined in the pi spirit. "We were never good at math in my family," Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) noted. "I thought I was voting for p-i-e."

Yet at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which takes credit for the first Pi Day celebration in 1988, staff and visitors ate fruit pies after they had marched around a circular space.

Source: Politico, March 12, 2009; ; CNET News, March 11, 2009; Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2009