Well, if you use the European calendar marking, day then month, it makes sense. Eighth graders everywhere (and a few teachers I have known) often think of 22/7 as the actual value of Pi. This particular approximation was the upper limit of Pi when Archimedes approximated it by inscribing and circumscribing polygons with 98 sides.

Pi Day is more often celebrated on March 14th, 3.14 and if you want to be way pedantic you can celebrate Pi second at 1:59:26 on that day (pi is approximately 3.1415926….).

Ok, its actually closer to 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974

94459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230

66470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211

0555964462294895493038196...

Ok, in 2002 we went over two trillion known digits of pi… for obvious reasons I will not list them all. I will tell you that in the first trillion digits there are more eights than any other digit, and less zeros. In fact, zero starts out slow right from the beginning. The first zero occurs in the 32nd decimal place.

Some want to celebrate on Feb 27th since the Earth has moved 1 radian http://www.pballew.net/arithme8.html#radian (appx) around its orbit [that’s about 57 degrees or 360/(2pi)] since Jan 1. That seems to be a bad choice for me..better to pick a day when the earth has moved one radian from its apogee or perigee or a solstice. How about 58 days (365/2pi) after March 20th… hmmmm that would make it about May 17th.

Some pick November 10th, the 314th day of the year, but then you have to remember to celebrate on November 9th if it’s a leap year…. I’m big on holidays that happen the same day every year, Christmas, April Fool’s day, New Years even. December 21st , the 355th day of the year, at 1:13 is a choice for clever people who like 355/113 as an approximation for Pi, and it is a really good one. The Chinese Tsu Ch'ung Chi knew this one by the year 500 AD.

Speaking of Pi, I Summer in “Cherry Country”, only 15 miles from the Self proclaimed “Cherry Capital of America”, Traverse City, Michigan. Just by chance, I happened today to drive by a sign in Charlevoix, about 30 miles to my North, that proclaims it to be the home of the World’s Largest Cherry Pi (oops, put an e on that one). It was cooked by the townsfolk in 1976, obviously in a bicentennial euphoria, built a giant pan and an even larger oven to cook it. Supposedly the locals provided enough material to cook a pie weighing 17,420 pounds, or about 5545 Pi Pounds. The memorial stands on the side of US Hwy 31 just south of town.
Unfortunately, like all records, this one was doomed to be broken. Any day now someone will find a NEW last digit of Pi, and the Charlevoix Pi(e) has already dropped to (at least) third place in the great Pie race. Only twelve years after Charlevoix’s creative display, the envy in Traverse City was too much to bare, so they made an even larger one at the Chef Pierre Bakeries. They have a monument too, but it is mostly hidden in the bushes off Cass street near the production plant which is now owned by Sara Lee (but that will change some day too). The joy of the National Cherry Festival record lasted even less time than Charlevoix’s. Within five years the title had moved out of cherry country, out of the state, and out of the USA. As far as I know, the largest Cherry Pi in the world was baked in Oliver, British Columbia; but I still drive by and salute the folks of Charlevoix for their bicentennial effort.
Student’s always ask if the ancient Greeks used pi to measure the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. Pi was, and still is, the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Its use as the ratio of the circumference to diameter of a circle is relatively modern. The Greeks more often used the letter to stand for periphery, the term they used for the circumference of a circle. They did, however, commonly use pi as a number. The Greek number system used 27 letters of the Greek alphabet (including three antiquated symbols) to represent the numbers from one to 900. This allowed them to express any number less than 1000 with only three "digits". In this system, pi used as a number would represent 80.
According to Antreas P. Hatzipolakis,a real live Greek Geometer, the Greeks did not use any particular symbol for the ratio we now refer to with pi. The first known use of the symbol for its present purposes was in 1706 by William Jones(“Synopsis Palmariorium Mathesios”), an English mathematician, although it was the use of the symbol by Euler that brought it its permanency.
I am astounded still by the fact that there is an algorithm, published in 1996, which allows the nth hexadecimal digit of pi to be computed without the preceding digits.

For those who only think Pi shows up in circles, I would point out the following…
If you add the reciprocals of the squares, 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9… the total is (pi^2)/6…
If you take a toothpick or a needle and randomly cast it on a wooden floor with equally spaced cracks, the probability that the needle crosses a crack is a relation depending on pi…
If you want to find the number of people who are ½ inch taller than the average, the expression for the normal density curve of human height, involves Pi.

It’s everywhere you look, so…………..Maybe everyday should be Pi day… heck… maybe it already is.