Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi), and is observed on March 14 since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π. Pi Day was first observed in 1988, and since then celebrations of the day often have involved eating pie, or holding various mathematical competitions.
To mark Pi Day this year, Amazon Science utilized a Times Square billboard normally used by Amazon Music to honor scientists, engineers, and mathematicians past, present, and future.
The billboard display ran from midnight to 8 a.m. and again — for 3 hours and 14 minutes — from 3:14 p.m. to 6:28 p.m. The display (which you can watch above) began by honoring Marie Curie, the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1903 for her contributions to physics. It was Curie who once famously said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
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To mark Pi Day this year, Amazon Science utilized a Times Square billboard to honor scientists, engineers, and mathematicians past, present, and future. The display, which you can browse here, began by honoring Marie Curie, the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1903 for her contributions to physics. Click through to see each of the people and moments honored on Pi Day.
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arXiv hosts more than 2,035,720 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
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Alexa was introduced to the world on Nov. 6, 2014. Now, eight years later, customers in more than 80 countries interact with Alexa billions of times each week.
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Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879.
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The Viterbi Algorithm, a mathematical formula to eliminate signal interference, is connecting you to more than 7,930,681,085 right now.
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The team at Lab126 designs and engineers the Amazon Astro robot, Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and other devices.
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Katherine Johnson did the trajectory analysis for NASA’s Friendship 7 before it launched in 1962.
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Edwin Armstrong developed FM radio on Columbia’s campus at 1150 Amsterdam Avenue in New York.
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Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) was launched 16 years ago on Pi Day, as the first generally available AWS service.
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Alan Turing, WWII enigma codebreaker and father of computer science, had an IQ of 186.
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The first internet transmission was sent on Oct. 29, 1969 from 3420 Boelter Hall at UCLA.
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Amazon, via the Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program, has funded more than 385 research proposals at 132 universities since 2018.
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The Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer was named after computer science pioneer Grace Hopper.
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Scientists and engineers at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) landed the Mars Pathfinder on Mars on July 4, 1997 and have been operating rovers ever since — or for 9019 Earth days on March 14.
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New Shepard has flown 19 consecutive successful launches, including 3 flights with a total of 14 astronauts aboard.
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John Young, who became the 9th person to walk on the moon in 1972, served as commander of Apollo 16.
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Waldo Semon conducted 14,492 experiments to develop synthetic rubber used during WWI.
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There have been more than 24,806,391 interactions with Alexa Prize socialbots.
On Pi Day, we honored some of the scientific giants on whose shoulders we stand, feature a few key accomplishments achieved by Amazon’s researchers and engineers, and highlight some of our university collaborators who are developing the next generation of STEM talent who will help us understand our world more fully, so we may fear less.
For, as Alan Turing once said, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Below are items highlighted on the Times Square billboard:
