The late Larry Shaw didn’t necessarily look like a physicist.
Not with that mane of Viking-red locks unfurling past his shoulders like that.
Not with that Allen Ginsberg beard and goofy, wide-open smile that appeared to show all 32 teeth.
Except, maybe he did.
Look like a guy who spent his life happily chasing equations, that is.
After all, this was San Francisco and it’s all relative, anyway.
Heck, Albert Einstein, another follicly enhanced physicist, long had that number. Al could have told you all about it – but that’s getting ahead of the proceedings.
Piece of the Pi
First: Today is National Pi Day, a celebration of 3.14, the magical, mystery number.
If you were good in school, you already know the number.
You at least know of it.
And Lord (and Einstein) knows, you’ve seen the Greek letter representing it that looks like a cool tattoo.
Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and, unlike those rows of multiplication tables you were forced to memorize in third grade, it’s got true staying power.
Thousands of years of math-geek, throw-weight, in fact.
Archimedes of Syracuse, who died in 212 B.C., first calculated it, thereby carving his reputation as the first mathematical superstar in the ancient world.
But back to the above.
Archimedes, and others, determined that a circle of any size is always going to be three times its width around – with 3.14 being the number that always pops.
Or, 3.14159, to be exact.
In math circles, that makes it a “constant number” – and thus the standard measurement of any circle, of any size.
Word of mouth (and math)
Today orbits back to the same March day in 1988, when the aforementioned Shaw decided he’d have some numbers-fun with his colleagues at San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum.
That’s where Shaw, who died in 2017, did research and coordinated learning programs for youngsters.
By numerical accident on the morning of that fateful day 33 years ago, Shaw noticed the date and how it matched up with the venerated equation.
By 1:59 p.m., to correspond with the numbers that follow 3.14, Shaw and his wife had put out an array of fruit pies and coffee and tea for the staff to enjoy.
Pi meets pie.
Word of math, and word of mouth – the employees couldn’t stop talking about the cleverness of it all.
Now, Pi Day is a phenomenon, with a numerical, intellectual (and marketing) reach taking in the very circumference of the globe.
Bakeries and pizza shops add to the whimsy with specials on pies of every relative circumference.
Don’t lose that number
Educators love today because they say it demystifies math.
It takes out that bias, they said, and self-imposed boundaries that decree one is either a “math person” – or one isn’t.
Just ask any harried mom or dad coming off a run of pandemic-induced distance-learning with their kids.
Math, more often than not, is perceived as homework torture.
A survey last spring by Brainly, an online learning academy in New York City, bore that out.
Of the 600 parents who responded to Brainly’s survey about helping their kids with homework, 79% of the respondents had overall angst – and 65% said math was the root of all their ills.
But still, math is math.
And one never gets away from math.
There’s the interest payment.
The sales tax.
The doubling-up of the recipe.
And the cost of the tile in relation of the square-footage of the bathroom you promised to remodel, since you watched too many DIY shows during quarantine.
It is how it looks
That’s why Chris Kelley, a proud son of Brooklyn, N.Y., who now teaches math in Marion County, wages his wager.
Students on the first day in his class at the Youth Academy in Pleasant Valley are always presented with a proposition.
Come up with one idea in life that has “absolutely nothing” to do with math, their teacher will say, and you’ll be awarded an A for the term – with no other questions asked.
“One idea,” he said. “Of course, that’s impossible. But they keep trying, and they keep learning, in the process.”
Before COVID-19 subtracted everything, Math Field Day was a real event in Monongalia County’s school district.
Whole tables of students would queue up like numbers on a spread sheet, clicking the buttons on those scary-looking scientific calculators just like a Bach concerto.
Equations would drop like the pins on your grandma’s bowling night.
No algorithm was left unturned.
As Cara Spaziani says, it’s not necessarily the math, it’s the multiplication of deductive reasoning and critical thinking.
She’s a former reporter who went into education. She teaches 4th grade at Ridgedale Elementary School, meaning a unit on math is always going to be in the daily lesson plan.
Spaziani began her career telling stories, and math is no different from any other narrative.
Teaching math, in particular, means telling a story.
As she said, why ask an elementary student to memorize, “6×3=18,” when counting rows of pennies or LEGOs could be that much more compelling?
“That way, they know what math ‘looks’ like,” she said.
Coming back around
In Larry Shaw’s case, math looks like that cool professor at Hogwarts that the fledgling wizards always took for electives.
He eventually began dressing up in fanciful robes and hats to lead parades through the Exploratorium every March 14, which was decreed an official Pi Day holiday by U.S. Congress in 2009.
It was a celebration, multiplied by two.
Today is also Einstein’s birthday, the first science superstar of the 20th century who was born March 14, 1879.
He did his most profound work as a patent clerk, scribbling out the rudiments of his Theory of Relativity in between the rubber stamps and the filing.
That was the only job he could get at first.
By the time his circles around the Sun ended April 18, 1955, his intellect and research had encompassed … Everything.
TWEET@DominionPostWV
