The Admirable Number Pi

Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three. That's about as long as I can remember. How long can a number run, you ask? About forty feet, in the case of the admirable number Pi. The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.

What is a number, first of all? Isn't it something between zero and nine? How can a puny Greek letter, that which resembles a shack with a corrugated tin roof, also be considered a number?

And how important can a number be, anyway? We all hold numbers un-dear. The mere image of numbers sends us scuttling away for cover (at least our minds do the running away for us). How can something so inexplicably long and endless be of so much weight to civilization?

Mathematicians think they know the answer. They are both human and intellectual, so they think they hold more authority than anyone else to explain the universality of the number Pi. Ask them, and they go on explaining about circles and diameters and ratios and peripheries. You feel feeble and unimportant just listening to them. Mathematicians are like the numbers they study -- in the name of preserving self-worth you end up scurrying away the first chance you get.

Physicists think they know the answer. They, too, are both human and intellectual. But they think that they hold more authority than mathematicians, because to them physics encompasses everything else in science, mathematics included. Ask them about Pi, and they start babbling about the universe, cosmological constants, and spherical coordinate systems. "Spherical what?", you ask. Exactly my point. Hurry away, then.

The Egyptian scribe Ahmes (c. 1800 BC) thinks he knows the answer. He is intellectual, too, no doubt. And he thinks he holds more authority than mathematicians and physicists combined, because he was both mathematician and physicist. He is the first person to whom the discovery of Pi is ascribed, and he got to within two-hundredths of the modern value by simply dividing 256 by 81. Ah, numbers again.

And so you continue running.

The pageant of personalities claiming to have been gifted the ability to discern the importance of the number Pi doesn't stop at page's end. It can go on across a table, through the air, over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky, through all the bottomless, bloated heavens. Some will claim utmost academic authority, armed with diplomas and certificates and thick spectacles, while some will claim divine inspiration. Some will do so with the passion of a swarm of bees defending their colony from being de-honeyed.

But at the end of the day, when someone asks, "what is the number Pi?", what do we answer? Do we say what the mathematicians say? Or do we pretend we like physics, and babble off about cosmological blah blah? Do we refer the inquisitor to Ahmes (not that we know where his remains lie)?

You may or may not take me seriously, but I think I know the answer. I am not an intellectual, but at least I am human enough to understand that knowledge, like the number Pi, is practically endless. I do not claim to hold any authority, but I nonetheless fancy that the bounds of human wisdom, like the number Pi, cannot be comprehended at a glance, by calculation or imagination, not even by wit -- that is, by comparison to anything else in the world. By nature we have limits, but of all the things that make us human, it is our intelligence that is least bound.

Yes, the number Pi is a mathematical constant, one that scientists use to try to understand the universe. But it is also as it appears -- a shack with tin roofing, a house. It represents everything we know and are about to know, that shelters us from the ignominy of ignorance and incapacity. It symbolizes our departure from dinosaurhood, our march to brilliance. The number Pi is us -- allegory to how far humanity has come in terms of reason, and to how much further it seeks to stride.

That we have come so far, from being mere cavemen, to mathematicians and physicists and modern day Ahmeses, is testament to the virtual boundlessness of our intellect. Whether we are children, adults, or veterans of the world, there will always be that extra room in our seemingly limited brains for things new and untrodden. All new knowledge is initial, because it never ends, much like every single digit in the hierarchy of the admirable number Pi.


"It keeps on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nidging a sluggish eternity
to continue."
-from Pi, by Wislawa Szymborska, 1976