Happy Pi Day!

National Pi Day takes place every year on March 14, a nod to the first three digits of the mathematical constant 3.14. Falling on Albert Einstein’s birthday, Pi Day is celebrated by math fans all around the world – often with pie to celebrate all things pi!

Brainly, the largest online homework help community, surveyed 900 American students about math and pi, and found that math is not universally disliked as the cliche would suggest.

When asked to select their favorite subject in school, students answered:
Math (26.4%)
Science (20.3%)
English (20.1%)
Social Studies or History (18%)
Other (15.2%)

The Top 5 States Where Math is Students’ Favorite Subject:
New Jersey (41.7%)
Massachusetts (41.6%)
New Hampshire (37.6%)
Maryland (36.5%)
New York (36.2%)

Brainly’s survey yielded some surprising insights about what students know about pi:
74% of students said they are confident they know how to write the number for pi, but…
55.3% of students could identify the first 5 digits of pi
34% of high school students who said they knew how to write pi, chose the wrong option
30.5% of students know that pi is defined as the radio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter
49.1% of the students know that pi is an irrational number

Just for fun, when polled about their favorite pie flavors, students responded:
Chocolate (22.7%)
Apple (22.1%)
Lemon meringue (15.9%)
Blueberry (12.3%)
Cherry (8.4%)
None (18.6%)

Did you know?
>> The value of pi was first calculated by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world.

>> Pi was first baptized with the Greek letter as its name when William Oughtred called it as such in his works dating back to 1647, later embraced by the scientific community when Leonhard Euler used the symbol in 1737.