March 14 is recognized as global Pi Day. Pi represented by the Greek letter π is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which is approximately 3.14159 (hence the 14th day of the third month 3/14).
In 2017, Pi Day was celebrated at the Monroe Correctional Center in Washington state, where prisoners who were math enthusiasts were joined by mathematicians. It was the first event organized by the Prison Mathematics Project (PMP), an organization started by Christopher Havens to share his passion for math with fellow inmates.
This year, the PMP’s Pi Day celebrations will be virtual with mathematicians from all over the world coming together and sharing their knowledge and passion with a growing community of prisoners who love mathematics.
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This Inmate Used Solitary Confinement to Learn Math. Now He s Solving the World s Hardest Equations
In 2010, Christopher Havens was sentenced to 25 years for murder. In 2020, his work in number theory was published in an academic journal. Feb 21, 2021
The walls of the cell where Christopher Havens was serving a 25-year murder sentence were covered in notebook paper.
The sheets filled with numeric and Greek scratchings had quickly overwhelmed his modest desk and were now forming a patchwork wallpaper that spread from that corner and began to wrap around the 8x12 room. The neatly nesting equations of the continued fractions guiding his chase could run on for 15 feet as he hunted for patterns that might offer a clue.
This past year, some have felt like prisoners in their own homes, and have described both positive and negative aspects of it. The negatives are obvious. One positive is the opportunity for contemplative silence needed for deep thinking. Perhaps that is why influential literature has come from the incarcerated: Martin Luther King Jr., Paul the Apostle, Adolf Hitler, John Bunyan and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s "Letters and Papers from Prison."I became interested in the plight of the prisoner