Pi day pies

Happy Pi Day

The 14th of March is Pi Day. It gets this honour because in US notation it’s 3/14 and Pi is 3.1415… OK I had to look that up to be sure but I’m a biologist by training not a mathematician.

As a team who work a lot with numbers we wanted to mark the occasion. So we decided to bake some pies. In some organisations this could have taken the form of a bake-off. As we’re a remote team it’s a bit difficult to rate each other’s bakes so instead it was a simple celebration of pie and, by extension, pi.

Leek and potato pi

Libby made a pie/pasty hybrid. Tasty leek and potato encased in delicious puff pastry. It was finished with the symbol pi, though through the dangerous alchemy of baking the horizontal shape migrated a bit.

A sound combination of the best of pie, pasty and pi. (Which makes me wonder… is there a Venn Day?)

A photo shows a roughly circular disc of pastry sitting on a wooden chopping board which is sitting on a red cloth with white polka dots.

Curried vegetable pi

Sian created a curried vegetable pie. Her pi symbol is a work of art, though if this were a competition she might lose points for not having attached it to the pie lid.

Even so it looks mouthwateringly delicious.

Photograph looking down on a table shows the top of a pie with a pastry lid. The lid is decorated with a large pastry pi symbol

Bakewell… er… pi?

There was some debate about whether my entry was actually a pie. It was a Bakewell Tart in a pie tin. I didn’t decorate it with a pi symbol but I did use precisely 3.14g of flaked almonds to decorate it. Sadly none of my colleagues were able to independently verify this claim.

Photo looking down onto a table. A Bakewell tart is shown with rustic pastry around the edges.

Apple pi

Mads created an apple pie decorated with a pi symbol and a smiley face. It looks scrumptious. This isn’t a competition of course but if it were extra points would have to be awarded for the use of apples (we are called Data Orchard after all).

Do let us know if you too celebrated Pi Day. We’d love to see a picture of your pies. If this has whetted your appetite for pi and pie celebration you might like these 25 most interesting pi facts.

Ben Proctor