Pickering celebrates Pi day with pie

LYNN – For math enthusiasts everywhere, March 14 is an important holiday; it is the celebration of Pi, or the infinite number that represents the relationship between a circle’s diameter and its circumference.The never-ending number, which begins with 3.14 (March 14 is represented as 3-14, hence the holiday), has been stretched during the computer age to over one trillion digits after the decimal, and is an important part of learning geometry and high-school level math.William Jones first used the irrational number in 1706, but it became popular after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler adopted it in 1737. Pi has since become a staple in math, science and engineering, and has sparked an entire culture of Pi enthusiasts who are fascinated with its unique components.Schools across the world take advantage of Pi day every year, using it as a fun teaching tool to polish students’ math skills. At Pickering Middle School in Lynn, the day was filled with festive activities, including a pie-eating contest.Morning activities included a contest to see which student could recite Pi to the furthest decimal, with the winner, eighth grader Sarah Cowdell, reciting 501 numbers before making a mistake.Second place finisher Alicia Worthylake recited 85 decimal places, and third place winner Amanda Plourde managed to recite 70 decimals.Students also represented Pi with an infinite chain that wrapped around the cafeteria, with a different decimal number on every link.While the academic competitions were impressive, and the chain succeeded in showing the pure size of the number itself, the most popular and well attended contest came in the afternoon, where a group of hungry students lined up for a pie-eating contest.Unlike most eating contests, the competition at Pickering showcased the fastest pie eater, not the person who could consume the most pie in a certain amount of time.Students lined up in front of a small blueberry pie in a tin, with their arms behind their back, and with the ringing of a bell began to devour the pastry at heartburn-inducing speeds.While some students struggled to remove the pie from the tin, others seemed reluctant to get the blueberry and crust on their face and clothes.This was not the case for eighth grader Gerardo Cientanni, who used his nose to flip the pie out of the tin, and made the dessert disappear in under 60 seconds.”I didn’t eat anything all day, all I have been doing is training with my friends,” he said among a frenzied group of his classmates celebrating the triumphant win. “I just practiced eating pie with my friends. I was going to drop out but all of my friends encouraged me and they gave me the support that I needed to win.”I couldn’t have done it without my friends.”Teachers say the day, and especially the pie eating contest, are very popular every year, but they enjoy the activities too because it focuses on geometry and learning circumference, which the students are learning at this time of year.