Pi Day Celebrations

Man, yesterday was a red letter day here with all the interdisciplinary math we had going on during Pi Day 2011!  In the morning, my son and I worked with Maria Droujkova of Natural Math on a one-page book showing division of fractions that I am writing and my son is illustrating (both of us with Maria's wise counsel, of course).

In the afternoon, we did some of our other work, but then we kicked off the evening with our traditional (well, at least we've done it for the past couple of years since Maria has introduced us to Pi Day) Pi Day dinner of Pizza Pi(e)s.  Each one of us had our own pies with varying degrees of pi-ness.

My husband's pizza was pretty typical, with pi mostly being represented by rounds of sausage:

Mine was more of a celebration of circles.  I began with a circle of ricotta cheese (an idea I took from a recent Cooking Light magazine), then a circle of organic basil, then a circle of feta cheese, then another circle of basil.

I then layered that with circles of onion, then layered tri-circles red and green pepper on top of that.

My son had the most Pi pie, though.  He cut his pepperoni and mushrooms into the shape of pi.

It was a fun and delicious way to mark Pi Day.

Then, after dinner, we had a wonderful discussion with author Joe D'Agnese about ways to use his book Blockhead:  The Life of Fibonacci in exposing students to a variety of math ideas, but also in relating math to both history and real life.  Thanks to those who joined us for the talk.  If you missed it (or want to review it), you can access the recording of the discussion through this link.

Finally, after midnight, we had the Random.org number generator pick for the winner of the Blockhead book giveaway.  The lucky winner is Ann Murphy!  Ann, please email me at ccross@mindspring.com and let me know what dedication you would like on your autographed book (if any) and the address to which to send it.  It is kind of fitting that Ann won, because she got an extra five entries because she posted the information about the contest and webinar through her social network.  So I kind of like the fact that someone with a statistic advantage actually won the Pi Day giveway--although, as I said, I left it up to the random number generator to pick the winning number.

Congratulations to Ann--let us know how you use the book once you get it.  And I will be posting the list of suggested books in a forthcoming blog post.