March 14 is Pi Day. It’s a day to celebrate circles and the miraculous, never-ending numeral that is pi.

Here are three reasons to celebrate Pi Day – and a tip to help you make the most of Pi Day at school (it involves pizza).

1. Pi – It Never Ends, and That’s Amazing

No matter what your perspective, Pi Day provides an opportunity to actually formulate an idea of what infinity means.

We talk about pi as being approximately 3.14, but the decimal places go on infinitely. How far is infinity?

How about this for a thought experiment: You go home and you spend the next week writing your life story. Everything. Now we take every letter of the alphabet and assign it a number. (For instance: A = 1, B = 2, C= 3, and so on.) Then we take your life story and turn it into numbers based on the code we just created.

At some point during the infinite progression of pi, the numeric code we created that represents your life story would occur, in order, from start to finish.

Mathematicians have attempted to get deep into pi, and they’ve found over one trillion numerals in it, but they’re still going. It’s pretty amazing. Here’s the first 100 to get you down the road to thinking about just how many one trillion would be.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

2. It’s an Excuse to Eat Pizza as a Learning Device

This is a great way to get your teachers to make Pi Day a little more fun. Tell them to order your class a pizza and that, using pi, you’ll calculate how much crust there is. (If you don’t like pizza, pie can be easily substituted.)

It’s easy and a practical use of pi. You could even impress your teacher by doing it multiple ways.

Did they order a 22-inch pizza? Circumference = π times diameter (C=πd), so approximately 3.14 times 22. There’s just over 69 inches of crust there.

Have the teacher give you a single slice of pizza. One of the long sides of the pizza represents the radius of the pizza (r). Circumference = 2πr.

Or you could calculate the area of the pizza. Area = πr².

There are a lot of ways you can convince your teacher that ordering a pizza is educational on Pi Day, and you wouldn’t be wrong. And you’d also have pizza.

3. It’s Advanced, but Easy to Understand and Use

Pi Day is a good time to remember that pi is pretty amazing. It’s a complicated thing. It’s an infinite number that gives us an incredible amount of information about geometry.

Yet, it’s also very easy to comprehend. If you followed the ideas in point number two, then you get pi. And that’s what Pi Day is all about. We’re celebrating math, because math makes the world comprehensible, even when it can seem complicated.

Now, if the pizza thing works, think of ways you can turn other math holidays into excuses to grab some treats in school. If it helps, use this post to help recommend some other math games you could play in class.