Some students don't like math because they can't link it to people or places.  Not everyone gets a natural thrill from reducing fractions or solving equations!  But mathematics, just like history or literature, is composed of real people and their extraordinary stories.  Maybe the right-brain thinker in your class will perk up when he or she hears about some of the human history behind pi.  Telling stories from math history is an under-utilized teaching angle, on Pi Day and every day of the year.

Here we're working to deliver you some of the best stories of pi.  Subjects of these stories include:

U.S. House Resolution 224 - Congress votes to recognize Pi Day, but not everyone is on board
William Jones  -  A coffeehouse lecturer with lucky political ties and a pal named Isaac Newton
Gaurav Raja - A high schooler in Virginia, motivated by pizza, video games, and the record books
The Origin of the Pi Rap  -  An impromptu Wall Street fundraiser, and a national conference call
Ludolph van Ceulen  -  A fencing coach, an unusual gravestone, and a lot of number-crunching
David & Gregory Chudnovsky  -  An apartment-sized computer built from spare parts
Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D.  -  A frustrated State legislature and a confused small-town doctor


William Jones  (1675 - 1749)
   »  First mathematician to use the Greek letter π to represent the important ratio

A brief description...

While talk of the ratio has been around for about 4,000 years, and the number itself probably a bit longer, the symbol π is just reaching the big 3-0-0.  A fellow from the Welsh island of Anglesey, who grew up to be a rather well-connected but unmemorable mathematician, decided to use the Greek symbol for “p” in a math-for-beginners guide he published in 1706.  He figured it would look nicer than the “p” used in prior years, which stood for “periphery.”  It probably wouldn’t have sunken in to the math community, had it only been used by a guy who spent most of his mathematical prime (young adulthood) teaching math onboard naval battleships and in London coffeehouses.  But when a much bigger fish named Leonhard Euler used Jones’ new notation in his works about 30 years later, the symbol was here to stay. 

Jones attempted to secure a teaching job at an actual math school, but even with references written by his friends, Sirs Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, he was rejected and stuck to his coffeehouse crowd.  He spent his later adult life serving in a variety of cushy political jobs, which he got through some key connections after losing  all his money in a bank collapse.  It's always nice to have friends in high places.

We should be glad William Jones didn't come up with γ (or gamma, the alphabet's third letter, like “c”) to stand for "circumference" or "circle" in his 1706 writings.  Gamma Day sounds a bit less tasty and somewhat more radioactive.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164...

Gaurav Raja  (1990 - )
   »  Teenage pi reciter who broke the 27-year-old North American record in 2006

A brief description...

There are some kids who enjoy learning 20 or 30 digits of pi to impress their classmates. And then there’s Gaurav Raja. He made headlines in his local Roanoke, Virginia newspapers, and later on the Today Show, for his uncanny ability to learn and recite pi to thousands of digits.

It began with a pizza. This was his prize in Dr. Linda Gooding’s math class when, as a freshman, he coasted to victory in a classroom competition on about 250 digits. But his incentives grew over time. The pizza would come easily each year, but Gaurav’s real craving was to land himself in the record books. Or record list, rather, in the form of the austere but authoritative Pi World Ranking List. His sights were set on the all-time North American record, previously set in 1979 at a staggering 10,625 digits. As if this Everest-like ascent wasn’t inspiring enough, his parents promised he’d get an Xbox 360 out of the deal. Let’s look at a timeline of the last few years in Gaurav’s unlikely quest.

Gaurav has told TeachPi.org that he is done memorizing pi, and expects only the first 200 digits or so to remain burned into his memory forever.  He now needs room in his brain for other things, as a hard-working student at Virginia Tech.  We wish Gaurav all the best in college!  Thanks for the memorization memories.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164...

Ludolph van Ceulen  (1540 - 1610) (Sing about him here!)
   »  Tireless hand-calculator who took pi to 35 digits & had them engraved on his tombstone

A brief description...

He spent a lifetime number-crunching, and all he wanted was to carve it into stone.  Ludolph van Ceulen was a German mathematician in the late 1500s who moved to the Netherlands to escape oppression.  He had two passions: math and sword-fighting.  Well, fencing, to be more precise.  In his fifties, he began teaching both of these arts at a Dutch university.  But his real life's work was in calculating that unnamed ratio. (Recall that the Greek letter wasn't used for another 100 years.)

In mounting his assault on the number, Ludolph used the same weapons that the Chinese and the Greeks (like Archimedes) had both used more than a thousand years earlier.  In other words, it was a pretty old-fashioned method.  He used what we now learn in high school geometry to compute the area of shapes with more and more sides.  Think of a circle as a regular polygon with an infinite number of sides.  Ludolph came pretty close to that -- 32 billion.  Imagine him spending years hand-calculating the area of a 32 billion-gon.  Whew!  At one point, he published 20 digits in a math book, and by the end of his life of geometry and swords, he had found the first 35.

So proud was Ludolph of this grand accomplishment that he had the numbers engraved on his tombstone.  Sort of a personal Guinness record book.  But the grave was actually swapped by his widow (presumably for something less nerdy) shortly after his death, and the stone changed hands a few times and was eventually re-cut to fit into a pillar in the nearby St. Pieter's Church.  It's a good thing we didn't need that grave for mathematical purposes; just 11 years after his death, a Dutchman named Willebrod Snell found a much, much faster way to do the same calculations that it took Ludolph a lifetime to do. 

As the 1600s marched on, Isaac Newton started up calculus, and fancy trig functions (arctangents) became the new style for pi calculation (100 digits were known by 1706).  Oh, how time flies.  But to honor Mr. van Ceulen's painstaking devotion, Germans still sometimes refer to it affectionately as "the Ludolfian number."  Next time you're in a fencing competition in Germany and someone asks you what you call that one circle ratio, keep this in mind.

The Origin of the Pi Rap (March 2004)
   »  Three days of focus, ending with a sudden command performance in front of hundreds

A brief description...

It was Monday, March 8th.  The sixth Pi Day of Luke's speaking career was approaching, but he hadn't yet been invited to return to his college for his annual presentation.  When he finally got the call that afternoon, he decided it was time to add something to his act.  Each year since 1999, he'd given a lecture about the history and mystery of pi, always ending with the recital of 250 digits from memory, and a cheesy piano love song about the number.  He wanted to spice things up in '04, so he decided to write a rap.

Luke worked at an investment bank at the time, in a 10-hour-a-day job.  For the next 72 hours, he filled every spare moment, from lunchtime to his bus commutes to his evenings at home, with pondering and writing the lyrics.  He was a big fan of Eminem's recent hit, "Lose Yourself," and the song's theme of performing under pressure lent itself quite well to the idea of reciting that elusive number in front of a crowd.

Luke finished the rap on Thursday, and performed it for a few coworkers that afternoon.  His boss overheard the mini-concert, and he confronted Luke about it the next morning.  No, he wasn't upset; in fact, he wanted Luke to perform it on the company's trading floor, in front of a couple hundred people, as a charity fundraiser!  The company was about to launch a two-week drive to raise money for a local foodshelf, and Luke's boss thought this would be a great way to kick off the event.  Raise $2,500 by noon, he challenged the company, and Luke will rap live in front of everyone.  And if other branches of the investment firm were to donate, then Luke would wear a headset and turn the performance into a national conference call! 

The money poured in, and in just three short hours, people had given well over $4,000 to the cause.  Luke didn't even have his own words quite memorized yet, but he donned his now-famous Pi Diddy hat and gave it all he could.  Hundreds of traders and analysts dropped what they were doing and stared (or listened) as Luke stomped back and forth across desks, singing about how possessed he was by a number.  It was a hit.  In the end, the company matched many of the donations, raising the total to about $7,300...  not bad for an impromptu hip-hop benefit concert on a trading floor.

Luke went on to perform his rap at his alma mater that afternoon, March 12th, and would later sing it for dozens of middle school classrooms.  He recorded it professionally in late 2005, and in early 2006 it became the most popular feature on TeachPi.org.  In 2007, his song and classroom presentations were covered by local and national media, and he was even quoted in Newsweek talking about the celebration of his very favorite number.

More to come!