There is a lot going on in March. Daylight Saving Time starts on March 12 — get ready to turn your clocks forward an hour! St. Patrick’s Day is on March 17. Spring o cially starts March 20. There are a few other interesting days in March, too, like Pi Day. Pi is special because it is one of few numbers that cannot be written as a fraction. at makes it an irrational number. And when we write it as a decimal, the numbers never end … and they never repeat. Maybe you’ve seen Pi before. It is not a number but a symbol: π
It represents the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle (the distance around a circle divided by the distance across the widest section of the same circle). The answer will always be 3.14159265. at’s Pi.
So when it comes to Pi day, can you guess which day it is? March 14! That’s because March is the third month so the written date looks a lot like the number Pi – 3/14. Here are the first 100 digits of Pi! 3.14159265358979323846264338327 950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482 53421170679.
Have you ever heard the saying “Beware the Ides of March?” is phrase was made famous in the play “Julius Caesar,” written by William Shakespeare. It is said by a fortuneteller who is letting Caesar know something bad will happen to him during the Ides of March. In the play, that is when Caesar is assassinated. The Ides of March (or any other month for that matter) is much older than Shakespearean times, though. Using the ancient Roman calendar, each month was based on the phases of the moon. Kalends marked the new moon and the first day of the month. Nones was the next phase. It happened during the first quarter moon and fell on either the fifth or the seventh of the month. The Ides marked the first full moon of the month and usually fell mid-month.
Today, we use a different calendar than the Romans did, but we still have an Ides of March, and every other month, too. e Ides fall on the 15th day of March, May, July or October or the 13th day of any other month in the ancient Roman calendar.
