This story and poem is part of the Universe in Verse book.
“My business is a circle,” wrote Emily Dickinson in one of her cryptic letters.
Since ancient times, people have been consistently bewitched
the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, regardless of the size of the circle. Today, we have a symbolic form of that mathematical relationship: π – an ancient Greek letter given to a Welsh mathematician in the early years of the eighteenth century, although it was the ancient Greeks themselves who first thought mathematically about an abstract number. The longest number in nature and possibly the most powerful, π factors into our understanding of fractals and eclipses, of cosmology and thermodynamics, yet remains elusive in its entirety.
In the third century BCE, after millennia of Babylonian and Egyptian scholars tried to find their exact value in fractions, Archimedes developed a geologic system that included his first few numbers. Eight centuries later, ancient Chinese and Indian mathematicians calculated seven digits. The invention of calculus in the seventeenth century blossomed into hundreds of digits, and Newton himself made the first computer fifteen. Modern supercomputers can calculate with an absolute precision of 1.4 billion digits. We only need the first thirty-two to calculate the size of the known universe with a margin of error one proton wide.
An irrational number – a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, a ratio between two whole numbers – π loosens our basic assumptions about reality with its haunting whisper of infinity beyond reason's understanding. There are no known infinities in nature – as transient beings suspended in space between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, suspended in time that has not yet arrived, we simply cannot think of infinity.
And yet the decimal point of π taunts us like a gun barrel of unthinkability. If we ever reach the last digit of π, we will know the universe.
At the same time, its reassuring intensity accompanies our passing, subduing our longing for eternity in a universe ruled by perpetual change.
PI
by Wisława SzymborskaA positive number pi:
three points one four one.
All subsequent digits are also prime,
five nine two because it never ends.
It will not be understood six five three five look,
eight and nine by counting,
seven is nine or thought,
I mean three two three eight wisely, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake in the world is called standing at about forty feet.
Similarly, the snakes of myths and legends, although they may hold for a long time.
A page of digits including the number pi
it does not stop at the edges of the page.
It goes across the table, into the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, directly in the sky,
in all the empty, proud heavens.
How short – a rat's tail, a pigtail – a comet's tail!
How the star's ray weakens, bent by collision with space!
While we are here two three fifteen three hundred and nine
my phone number your shirt size year
nineteen seventy-three below six
the number of people living there is sixty-five cents
measure the hip two fingers charade, code,
what we get from it hail to you, blithe wind, bird you have never been there
aside Ladies and gentlemen, there is no reason to panic,
as well as heaven and earth will pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing done,
it continues to be amazing five,
unusually good eight,
away from the finals Seven,
shifting, always shifting for a lazy eternity
to continue.
