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- Hello and welcome to the Exploratorium. Thank you for joining us for Pi Day. My name is Lori Lambertson, and I'm one of the educators here in the Museum's Teacher Institute. March is our favorite month at the Exploratorium. It's when we celebrate our own holiday, Pi Day, and honor women in mathematics for Women's History Month. With this presentation, Pi Is Women's Work Celebrating Women in Mathematics. Katherine Johnson calculated our way to the moon and beyond. When Catherine Johnson was little, she loved to count things. A math prodigy, she attended high school at the age of 13. She was hand-selected to attend what had been an all white college for graduate studies. Her first job at NASA was with a group of women mathematicians that she called the computers who wore skirts, doing the math calculations for NASA's early space program. In 1962, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work for which she would become most famous. NASA's early computers had been programmed with the calculations to control Friendship 7's trajectory, from liftoff to splashdown. But the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of these early computers, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As part of the pre-flight checklist, John Glenn asked Katherine Johnson to run all the same numbers through all the same calculations that have been programmed into the computers by hand. She recalled his saying, "if she says they're good, then I'm ready to go." Katherine Johnson's calculation sent John Glenn into space and safely brought him home again. In 2015, President Barack Obama presented Katherine Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her technical leadership, calculating the trajectories that took Americans to the moon and beyond. Emma Haruka Iwao, was following a dream since childhood. And on Pi Day in 2019, her dream came true when she calculated a record number of digits of Pi using Google cloud technology. Emma calculated 31,415,926,535,897 digits of Pi. What do you notice? Does this number seem familiar? This number's digits are the first 14 digits of Pi. Fascinated by Pi, she first calculated it with a home computer when she was 12 years old, using the programming language C. When Emma was in college, one of her professors had held a previous record for calculating the most digits of Pi. That professor Dr. Takahashi encouraged Emma to reach her goal. How long would it take to count that many digits? Over a million years. Using Emma's Computer Configuration, it took four months on 25 virtual machines. At Google Emma use the cloud, and use only publicly available spaces making her configuration accessible to others. Was she worried that someone would use the same configuration and break her record? No, she thought it was exciting to get more people interested in these calculations. Her record held from Pi Day 2019, until January 2020, when Timothy Mullikin, calculated 50 trillion digits of Pi. Emma found her dream in the cloud and paved the way for others to do so. Vi Hart is a self-described math musician, and popularizer of mathematics. To help people see the beauty of mathematics, they created their own YouTube channel. They started with a series called Doodling in Math Class. Many of these videos start with a video typically taught in a high school math class, like logarithms, and rapidly turn into something completely different and wonderful. In this video, Vi Hart takes us from logarithms to dragon curves. Vi Hart's video about making hexaflexagons has had over 9 million views. Now that's popularizing mathematics. Every March 14 since 2010, Vi Hart has created a video to honor Pi Day. In 2019, their video on Pi Day shared a strategy for how to memorize 1000 digits of Pi. I'm happy to say that using this technique, I too can now recite 1000 digits of Pi. 3.14159999999999, what? These are actual digits of Pi. I'm just leaving out all the digits that aren't nines. Maybe you have a dream about sharing your love of math too. Whether you want to recite 1000 digits of Pi, create your mathematical future on social media, or make edible hexaflexagons, Vi Hart can show you how. Eugenia Cheng loves mathematics, music and food. And she's passionate about making math more understandable. Her PhD focus was higher dimensional category theory, which is a branch of mathematics that explains how mathematics works. Eugenia Cheng draws analogies between category theory and baking to explain mathematical topics in her book, How To Bake Pie. For example, let's consider how making pie follows the same general pattern. You start with a crust, you fill it with something delicious, and you end up with pie. You don't always need an exact recipe. But something more like a general procedure that allows you to riff on that pattern, and make many different kinds of pie. Eugenia Cheng describes doing mathematics likewise, the idea is to look for similarities among things. So you only need one recipe for many different situations. Mary Laycock was my math mentor. She could do algebra with plastic blocks, and prove geometric theorems with little bits of paper. Mary gave me the confidence to be a math teacher, and then to be a better math teacher. Mary had a vision of learning, not unlike that of the museum's founder, Frank Oppenheimer. When students would come up with an answer that seemed incorrect, rather than challenge those answers, Mary would ask, "what question were you answering?" Here's a bit of Mary's math made into a video by my colleagues here at the Exploratorium. Mary's inspired way of teaching, makes Pi and so many other mathematical concepts accessible to all students. Pamela Harris, is one of President Barack Obama's dreamers. Immigrating to the United States from Mexico, with her family when she was 12. She faced many obstacles in her educational career as an undocumented youth. From her high school counselor telling her that she should be a bilingual secretary to not being able to apply for funding to attend college. She persevered and attended a Technical College, which prepared her for university. As an undergraduate at Marquette University, a remark from one of her professors opened the door to a world that had been unknown, graduate studies in mathematics. This encouragement led Pamela to attend graduate school, where she studied combinatorics. While she worked on her PhD, she never met another Latina in her field. Now a professor, Dr. Harris continues her mathematical research, and advocates for greater visibility of Latina role models in mathematics. All of these women were encouraged by parents or teachers or other mentors in their lives. Think about who encouraged and supported you. Racism, sexism, and elitism have prevented many women and people of color from choosing to study science and mathematics. In order to break down these barriers, we must promote the work and lives of women and people of color in STEM fields, so that young people can see themselves in these positions. We must intentionally encourage and support young women and people of color. You never know when a single remark made to a young person can change the future like it did for Pamela Harris. Happy Pi Day everyone, and thank you for tuning in. Now, it's time to go cut some pie.