At exactly 3:14 p.m. on March 14, students and faculty from the math and physics department gathered at Varian patio for a Pi Day pie-eating contest hosted by Stanford University Physics Society (SUPS) and Stanford University Mathematical Organization (SUMO). Five representatives from each department competed to finish a whole apple berry pie, while President Jon Levin ’94 judged the contest.

“They ate a gigantic pie, partly with their forks and partly with their hands, and in a very close victory, the physics team ate their pie fastest,” Levin said in an interview with The Daily. “Congratulations Physics!”

Pi Day has been a national holiday since 2009, when Congress designated March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant pi, approximately equal to 3.14159, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Mathematicians and physicists around the world have celebrated Pi Day ever since, usually by eating pie.

SUPS co-president León Garcia ’27 raised the idea of a Pi Day pie-eating competition during a SUPS leadership meeting, after which SUMO quickly jumped on board.

“[These events] are opportunities to get people together in unserious ways… I wanted to provide a community space where people can engage with each other,” SUMO president Andrew Lee ’25 M.A. ’26 said, “It doesn’t necessarily have to be about math.”

Both teams featured faculty members, including Christine Taylor, a senior lecturer in the math department, and astrophysics professor Roger Blandford. SUPS and SUMO leadership also reached out to Levin, asking him to judge the event.

“It was radio silence for like a month, but then I got an email saying that Levin was on board. That’s when we knew that this was [going to] be for real,” Garcia said. “When Levin gets on board with something, people tend to turn out for it. Plus, he [was] an undergrad math major.”

Both Lee and Garcia hope to turn the contest into an annual tradition. After the competition ended, students helped themselves to free pie.