Pi fans meet March 14 (3.14, get it?)

There are logical gathering places for people like this, and one of them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, on March 14, students have been known to wish each other — out loud — a happy Pi Day.

The school plays a role in encouraging this: In the past it has tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn't work out this year. And last year, when an MIT official wrote on an admissions blog that it probably wouldn't work out then either, he was greeted with disappointment. "Pi Day seems so romantic," one prospective student wrote.)

There's a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes "3.14159." (It rhymes with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!" And Bryan Owens, an MIT senior, says the ability to recite pi is a sort of bragging right, a coin of the realm.

"It's like how much money you have," he says. "But you never win. You always find somebody who knows it to more digits than you do. I think the basic idea is we like to celebrate things, kind of celebrate who we are."

And that is why, like the Irish on St. Patrick's Day or Italians on Columbus Day, this Wednesday, 3-14, in many cases at 1:59 p.m., pi enthusiasts will have their moment in the sun.

At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, there will be pies to eat, people wearing pi jewelry, more beads — color-coded by digit — added to the pi string. And the celebrants will gather at a sort of pi shrine, a brass plaque engraved with pi's first 100 digits.

It may be a stretch to say that pi has achieved a kind of cultural cachet, but it is true that, as an obsession, it's not just for math geeks anymore. Givenchy makes a Pi perfume. Kate Bush sings out its digits in a song. And — of course — YouTube stocks videos of people reading pi into the camera.

Umile, the pi-chanting Medicare biller who struggled with self-confidence, is already booked to appear on a local TV show on Wednesday. The other night he rattled off 10,000 pi digits, just to keep the gears oiled.

Funny thing, though: For the life of him, he can't remember the phone number he calls every month to make his mortgage payment. And the other day he got his own bank account number wrong.

"It starts with 6-1-4," he says. "And I wrote 3-1-4."

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