It’s Pi Day, when we celebrate all things round by eating pizza and Pi Cake. This is the ninthyearwehavecelebratedPiDay and the fourth year in a row we got the Pi Cake from Empire Cakes. This year’s pizza place was Arturo’s on Thompson and Houston. Arturo’s is a great example of old New York pizza with an oven dating to the 1920’s.
In addition to the traditional Pi Symbol atop the cake we added Albert Einstein since today is also his birthday. It seems fitting that we lost one of the world’s other greatest physicists, Stephen Hawking on the same math holiday.
Pi Cake 2018
The crew has grown quite large from the five of us who celebrated our first pie day almost a decade ago.
Snowstorm Stella impacted both our numbers and our location, but last night a smaller crew braved the cold weather and messy streets to celebrate Pi Day with pizza and Pi Cake at Ribalta.
We naturally ate a lot of round pies and even a rectangular pie to honor Hippocrates’ squaring the lune.
This year’s Pi Cake came from Empire Cakes for thethirdyearinarow. It was their Brooklyn Blackout cake with Chocolate frosting, a blue Pi symbol on top and blue circles with red radii around the sides.
Last night we celebrated Rounded Pi Day by rounding at the 10,000’s digit to get 3.1416 which nicely works with the date 3/14/16. This was great after Mega Pi Day worked out so perfectly last year. And this all built uponpreviousyears’celebrations.
We ate a large quantity of pizza at Lombardi’s. and for the second year in a row we got the Pi Cake from Empire Cakes with peanut butter and chocolate flavors. The base was inscribed with historic approximations of Pi: 25/8, 256/81, 339/108, 223/71, 377/120, 3927/1250, 355/113, 62832/20000, 22/7.
This was the first time we utilized three instructors (as opposed to a main instructor and assistants which we often use for large classes) and it led to an amazing dynamic. Bob laid the theoretical foundation for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), explaining both with math and geometry, and discussed the computational considerations of performing simulation draws. Daniel led the participants through hands-on examples with Stan, covering everything from how to describe a model, to efficient computation to debugging. Andrew gave his usual, crowd dazzling performance use previous work as case studies of when and how to use Bayesian methods.
It was an intensive three days of training with an incredible amount of information. Everyone walked away knowing a lot more about Bayes, MCMC and Stan and eager to try out their new skills, and an autographed copy of Andrew’s book, BDA3.
A big help, as always was Daniel Chen who put in so much effort making the class run smoothly from securing the space, physically moving furniture and running all the technology.
This year we celebrated Mega Pi Day with the date (3/14/15) covering the firstfourdigits of Pi. And of course, we unveiled the Pi Cake at 9:26 to get the next three digits. This year the cake came from Empire Cakes and was peanut butter flavored. We even had the bakery put as many digits as would fit around the cake.
A large group from the NYC Data Mafia came out and Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours ensured we had the perfect assortment and quantity of pizza.
The problem starts with three doors, one of which has a car and two of which have a goat. You choose one door at random and then the host reveals one door (not the one you chose) that holds a goat. You can then choose to stick with your door or choose the third, remaining door.
Probability theory states that people who switch win the car two-thirds of the time and those who don’t switch only win one-third of time.
But people often still do not believe they should switch based on the probability argument alone. So let’s run some simulations.
This function randomly assigns goats and cars behind three doors, chooses a door at random, reveals a goat door, then either switches doors or does not.
monty <- function(switch=TRUE)
{
# randomly assign goats and cars
doors <- sample(x=c("Car", "Goat", "Goat"), size=3, replace=FALSE)
# randomly choose a door
doorChoice <- sample(1:3, size=1)
# get goat doors
goatDoors <- which(doors == "Goat")
# show a door with a goat
goatDoor <- goatDoors[which(goatDoors != doorChoice)][1]
if(switch)
# if we are switching choose the other remaining door
{
return(doors[-c(doorChoice, goatDoor)])
}else
# otherwise keep the current door
{
return(doors[doorChoice])
}
}
Now we simulate switching 10,000 times and not switching 10,0000 times
Continuing the annualtradition of Pi Cakes from Chrissie Cook we have gotten another Pi Cake! This year we let Drew Conway’s wife pick the flavors and she went with vanilla and red velvet (the blue color is to cause some cognitive dissonance). Looking forward to enjoying this tonight after some pizza.
Couldn’t resist showing off this article in Wired Magazine that quotes me. It’s a good take on the new, semi-corporate hacking culture, but then again, I may be a bit biased.