Oaklee celebrates Pi Day

As an events spe­cial­ist at Tree Pitts­burgh, Oak­lee loves hol­i­days. Though squir­rels don’t typ­i­cal­ly eat pie, she makes an excep­tion for pi day. Before indulging, though, Oak­lee has to do a lit­tle math.

Think back to your days of math class, specif­i­cal­ly geom­e­try. Do you remem­ber how to find the area of a circle?

Area = π x r²
(Where r is the radius of the circle)

This math comes in a handy in a few dif­fer­ent ways in forestry and arbori­cul­ture. Let’s say Oak­lee wants to fig­ure out the area of the canopy of the tree above him. Oak­lee takes 7 hops from the base of the tree out to the edge of the canopy. If each hop is 1 foot, then the radius of the canopy is 7 feet. We’ll assume the tree has a per­fect­ly round canopy. Then the area would be π * 7². So the tree Oak­lee is under in the pic­ture above has an area of 153.9 square feet. Nice job, Oaklee!

Anoth­er way Oak­lee can use pi is to fig­ure out the diam­e­ter of a tree. Remem­ber this equation?

C          = π * d
Where C is the cir­cum­fer­ence and d is the diam­e­ter of the circle.

If Oak­lee mea­sures the cir­cum­fer­ence of the tree to be 35 inch­es, then the diam­e­ter of the tree is 11.14 inches.

Whew, all that math was exhaust­ing. Time to eat some pie! Hap­py Pi Day, yinz.