Pi Day — a great day for whipped cream and integers

Elias Gerstman, an electrical engineering major from Maryland, enjoys a bite of chocolate cream pie March 12. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics got a bit of a jump on Pi Day (March 14) because the official date fell on a Saturday at the start of spring break.

Gerstman wears the department’s official Pi Day T-shirt, an annual design contest which he won in 2026. He depicts a unit circle on top of a pie with a lattice top crust. In more detail, it shows a unit circle with angle measurements depicted in terms of pi radians.

SDSU’s pi day tradition was begun in 2001 by faculty members Dan Kemp and Donna Flint. In addition to serving pie (38 of them this year), students are asked to put their name on a paper chain link, which are hung in the department hallways. This is designed to show the infinite nature of pi, which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or 3.14 for those not interested in the continuous addition of integers.

This year there were 278 participants, surpassing last year’s mark by five and bringing the cumulative total to 8,136, according to lecturer Bill Alsaker, who transitioned to Pi Day coordinator this year. The only thing that has been able to slow the continuous expression of the pi day celebration has been COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021.