Is Pi Day Evil? A Response

[ilzolende]

Summary: Pi day is pretty good, actually, at least when held to reasonable standards for holidays.

Post status: This is a pretty casual argument which I did not put a tremendous amount of effort into, and which is not intended to be hostile.

Zack M. Davis of An Algorithmic Lucidity has argued that Pi Day as observed on March 14th is an unholy festival of sin that is corrupting our children.

The gist of his argument is that "March 14th", the 73rd day of non-leap years via the Gregorian calendar, and a day that is about a week before the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, has really rather little to do with "pi", the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a constant which is also found in the probability density function of the normal distribution as well as other important contexts seemingly unrelated to circles. Their representations in human notation systems do bear some similarity, but this is due to the fact that Americans write dates as MM/DD/YY for … some reason, and humans tend to write numbers in base 5+5 due to having five fingers per hand and having two hands.

This is a pretty solid argument. However, it seems to be the kind of argument that implicitly assumes that other holidays are better, or at least that not celebrating Pi Day would be an improvement.

In our world, other holiday observances are similarly arbitrary and symbolic.

• Students in snowless biomes are encouraged to make paper snowflakes specifically to celebrate winter and specifically in a snowflake-y style.
• Christians in snowless biomes in the USA play songs about how only conifers stay green in the winter, and how it's snowy enough that special snow vehicles are required, and how it's snowy enough that they're stuck inside, despite having 0 snow and a wide variety of year-round greenery.
• This winter, I was encouraged by my religious beliefs to observe a holiday about planting trees and eating fruit while my region was subject to severe cold preventing regular winter business activities, and making it an obviously terrible time to plant trees.
• Many American holidays such as Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and possibly others have timing that may not technically be arbitrary but that nobody ascribes strong intrinsic meaning to.
• Yeshua of Nazareth probably wasn't born on December 25th of year 1 BC or 1 AD, IIRC, and yet everyone observes Christmas on December 25th anyway, and there is AFAIK zero push to accurately determine the exact birthdate of Christ and move Christmas to that date.

Additionally, a lot of "fun math stuff" targeted to children discusses decimal-base-specific properties of numbers and non-decimal-specific properties of numbers pretty interchangeably, and children sometimes think this is weird but I've never seen any child get upset by it.

In practice, March 14th ends up being a holiday for "talking about a cool mathematical constant and eating tasty food", which is pretty good as minor holidays go. Adding a "Radian day" to the year on a date when Earth is about what would be a radian through its orbit, pretending the orbit is circular and assuming that the Gregorian calendar start is a good 0 point, would be a fine thing to do (presumably one would celebrate such a day by doing fun things with light?), as would promoting some other mathematics holiday, or even promoting it as better than Pi Day. But Pi Day is probably superior to the absence of Pi Day, because the problems it has are already pervasive.