'Pi Day' Fundraiser to Honor Memory of Tinley Park Native

Lee Ann Murray loved numbers.

She graduated from Illinois State University with the intention to become an actuary—a career focused on the financial impact of risk and uncertainty. Numbers, numbers, and more numbers.

It’s fitting, then, that friends and family of the Tinley Park native are celebrating the woman’s memory on a day she would have loved. Murray, 24, died in September 2014, falling short of celebrating Pi Day 2015, or March 14, 2015. The date is being touted as the ”Pi Day of the Century,” giving math enthusiasts not just the first three digits (as in most years), but the first five digits of pi, the famous irrational number 3.14159265359… that expresses the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Friends will hold a fundraiser in Murray’s name Saturday at Blarney Stone Pub, 15400 S. Cicero Ave. in Oak Forest. Proceeds raised from 1 to 5 p.m.—through sales, raffles, and more—will go to the Lee Ann Murray Scholarship, to be awarded to a deserving Actuarial Science student at Illinois State University.

Murray’s roots run deep in the Southland. She attended Kirby District 140 schools, and as a youth and teen played soccer and softball, as well as danced at Blackbird Academy in Tinley Park. She went on to Victor J. Andrew High School, where she ran cross country. Her college career at ISU included classes in the honors program, Toastmasters, the Society of Actuaries and Gamma Iota Sigma. She graduated in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science and minor in Insurance. Her career pursuit then brought her to the Louisville, Kentucky office of Mercer, a leading global consulting organization, where she worked as an actuary.

Murray is remembered as “outgoing and joyful, quick to laugh with genuine enthusiasm,” and with “a great affinity for corny jokes.”

Earlier in the day at ISU, the actuarial sciences department will announce the first recipient of the scholarship in her name. The ceremony will be held at 9:15 a.m. The name will be read at the following time exactly: March 14, 2015 at 9:26:53 a.m. (3/14/15 9:26:53)—”because 3.141592653 is a pretty good estimate of the number.”

And Murray would have loved that.

Know Before You Go:

Where: Blarney Stone Pub, 15400 S. Cicero Ave., Oak Forest

When: Saturday, March 14, 1 to 5 p.m.

What: Pi Day fundraiser with raffles, live music, Irish dancing

How much: No cover, cash bar.