Engineering on Friday: Pi Day 2026

Happy Pi Day!

That’s March 14^th, in case you don’t know.

What better way to celebrate than with harvesting some Orange Pi, Banana Pi, and Raspberry Pi?

When I drew this, I was planning to leave it all black and white. For fun, I just paint bucketed some orange in the background and loved it. So, I took a shot at coloring the whole thing.

I also drew all the boards in it. But when I scaled the drawings down to match the proportions, they ended up looking like little photographs. Funny, they were drawn crudely, but look great all small.

In last year’s Pi Day post, I said this:  

It’s even older than Archimedes’s number (250 BCE). “Pi Day” was first coined by physicist Larry Shaw in 1988 and celebrated for the first time at the “Exploratorium Science Museum” in San Francisco. In 2009, Congress made it a formally recognized day. So, it took 2,239 years to go from Archimedes to the first Pi Day?

But, I didn’t explain how Pi is older than Archimedes Number. Although the first calculation of Pi was done by Archimedes (250 BCE), where he had the number in a range with one part of the range at 3.14085, the number has roots back to 1900 BCE. The Babylonians calculated the area of a circle with a rough approximation of 3.125 around 1900 – 1680 BCE. The Egyptians had pi at 3.1605, shown on the Rhind Papyrus in 1650 BCE.

For the record, it was Zu Chongzhi who had pi calculated to 3.14159 somewhere in the year 429-501. The ratio he calculated was 355/113.

Curious about the π symbol? William Jones minted it in 1706. Leonhard Euler, the guy who popularized “e,” adopted “π” for representing the number in 1737.

Let’s not forget that today is Albert Einstein’s birthday. So much to celebrate.

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