Math geeks have their Pi and eat it, too

For math nerds, Monday was a day when they could have their Pi and eat it, too.

"It's Pi Day because the date is 3/14 -- the first three digits of Pi," said Howard Greenspan, who oversaw a Pi Day Party online with a Pi drop at MathematiciansPictures.com, a Web site that sells Pi paraphernalia.

"This is the perfect holiday to celebrate in cyberspace," Greenspan told Reuters in a telephone interview from Toronto.

"We dropped the giant Pi online at 1:59 p.m. Eastern time," Greenspan said, noting that "3.14159 are the first six digits of Pi."

For those who flunked math, here's a clue: Pi is "that infernal and literally never-ending number that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter," Greenspan said. It takes its name from the Greek letter Pi.

So many people clicked on the Web site to watch the first Pi drop that the server was overwhelmed briefly. Instant replays continued to run on the site.

"It was huge, more than we expected," Greenspan said.

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It was also more fun than some assignments in his previous career as an architect and an Internet consultant, according to Greenspan. He is the executive operating officer of NetKaleidoscope.com, a private company that runs the math-oriented Web site and other online retailers that cater to people interested in classical music, art and physics.

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So far, online sales of Strawberry Pi and Pi in the Sky items -- T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs -- are running neck and neck in popularity, Greenspan said.

No one could blame fans of Albert Einstein, the famous physicist best known for his theory of relativity, or "E equals mc squared," if they leaned slightly toward Strawberry Pi.

March 14 is his birthday. He died in 1955 at age 76.

When asked what was the best thing about Strawberry Pi, though, Greenspan was quick with a quip: "No calories."