Students get their fill on Pi Day

Utah Connections Academy's Joziah Stewart competes in the third annual National Pi Day pie-eating contest at the Woods Cross charter school on Tuesday. Utah Connections is an online charter school that educates more 1,200 students from across the state in grades K-12. During the contest, seven students faced off against seven teachers. The event was also broadcast live to the computers of the school's 950 students statewide. Pi — the Greek letter “π” — is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159, hence why Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 around the world. Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits beyond its decimal point. As an irrational and transcendental number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern. While only a handful of digits are needed for typical calculations, Pi’s infinite nature makes it a fun challenge to memorize, and to computationally calculate more and more digits.