Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Procuring Perfect Pies for Pi Day

These juicy desserts are geometrically jagged. Can you fix them in time for an annual feast?

March 14, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Gaston wanted a hearty pie in the shape of an isosceles triangle.
Photographer: Mizina/iStockphoto

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Happy Pi Day! Math enthusiasts like me commemorate today’s date, 3/14, because it lines up with the mathematical constant Pi,1which represents the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. And how do we celebrate? By eating pies, of course — both because they sound like “Pi” and because they are typically round.2

But we have a problem at Conundrums Kitchen. Donald Duck was once again put in charge of pie-making — even after his lackluster performance during our Thanksgiving feast, when he mixed up the pie ingredients to the point of culinary disaster.