Happy Pi Day!
Happy Pi Day! There's no better way to celebrate than to make that perfect circle dessert, pie!
Pi is the constant used to calculate the area of a circle, as in pi times the radius squared, but it appears all over other parts of mathematics. It “is kind of a basic atomic building block” for math, said Temple University mathematician and author John Paulos.
In some places, Pi Day is celebrated with the edible type of pie.
“It's a real exciting moment for math enthusiasm,” said Nathan Kaplan, a Yale University math professor, who called it a time for people to “remember how much fun they found some of the stuff in school.”
One interesting aspect of pi is that it is irrational, which means the decimals after 3 go on to infinity with no repeating patterns. Yet in 1897, a bill before the Indiana legislature tried to round it up to 3.2. It fell flat.
“We cannot change it. It's not subject to opinion or taste or time,” Frenkel said. “How many things like this in the universe mean the same thing to everyone through time and space?”
For the pastry loving math geek, this is the perfect pie recipe to celebrat Pi Day.
This Dutch Apple Pie recipe is a wonderful change from standard two crust apple pies. Topped with a cinnamon brown sugar streusel topping, it adds extra flavor to the rich, juicy apple filling.
Dutch Apple Pie
Ingredients:
1 9-inch pie crust (recipe here)
8 crisp, medium apples
4 Tablespoons lemon juice
Streusel Topping:
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 cup + 2 Tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Core, peel and slice apples. Place apples and lemon juice in a bowl, mix well.
3. Mix brown sugar, white sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt.
4. Cut in butter with pastry blender, then add chopped walnuts.
5. Add half the mixture to the apples and mix to coat.
6. Place apple mixture into crust, then evenly sprinkle the rest of the struesel crumbs on top.
7. Put foil around crust. Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 minutes; remove foil and bake an additional 20 minutes.
The image featured at the top of this post is ©iStock.com/mg7.