SCIENCEThe Irrational Number That Somehow Became the World’s Most Beloved Holiday4 min read

How Universities Took It and Ran

Once Pi Day escaped the Exploratorium, other institutions got creative fast. St. Bonaventure University schedules its entire Pi Day itinerary by the minute. Festivities begin at 1:59 p.m. and run for exactly 2 hours and 65 minutes — mirroring 3.14159265. It’s the kind of obsessive numerical precision that makes mathematicians genuinely happy.

MIT turned the holiday into institutional theater. The school posts its undergraduate admissions decisions on Pi Day each year, timestamping announcements with deliberate care. In 2015, decisions dropped at 9:26 a.m. on 3/14/15 — six consecutive digits of pi in a single moment. In 2012, they went with 6:28 p.m. to honor tau, pi’s lesser-known cousin. In 2020, the timestamp was 1:59 p.m., circling back to the original.

Born on the Same Day as Einstein

Princeton, New Jersey, has an extra reason to go all out on March 14. Albert Einstein was born on that date in 1879 — in Ulm, Germany, though Princeton was his adopted home for the last two decades of his life. The town’s celebrations include walking tours of Einstein’s old haunts, pi recitation contests, pie tastings, and an Einstein look-alike competition that is exactly as delightful as it sounds.

March 14 carries one more resonance, a darker one. Stephen Hawking died on that date in 2018, at 76. Two giants of physics, separated by nearly a century, both marked on the same square of the calendar. Whether that’s meaningful or just coincidence, it’s the kind of fact that lodges somewhere and doesn’t leave.