Pi in the Sky

I’d like to wish you all a happy belated Pi Day. You know what I’m talking about, right? Every March 14th (3.14), families across the land gather close to honor the most special irrational number in the world. Everybody has their own way of celebrating. I change all the batteries in my calculator and bake, well ... pie. Sure, it doesn’t get all the publicity that Christmas or Thanksgiving gets, but it’s still one of my favorite holidays. I was in the card store just the other day looking for Pi Day cards, but I couldn’t find any. I guess they must have sold out. Wow, and I thought Valentine’s Day was big!

I tried to spread a little Pi Day cheer while I was walking down First Avenue the other day. Most people just looked at me like I had something large and green in my teeth, but one man actually put a quarter in my coffee cup. Too bad it still had coffee in it. One man with multiple tattoos of fire and skulls looked at me and said, “%@#$ off!” I felt bad. The holidays are such a stressful time for some people.

As you may know, π is the Greek letter for pi. If you multiply pi times the diameter of a circle, you’ll get the exact circumference. How cool is that! But it’s all one big lie, just like the Easter Bunny or a conservative Democrat, because pi is actually an irrational number. That means you can’t determine its exact value. I think that is why pi has always had a special place in my heart. I can also be irrational at times and there have been many times I have questioned my exact value.

As a child, I became obsessed with finding the exact value of pi. The computers at the time had calculated it out to thousands of digits, but I knew I could do better than that. I though that my 8th grade math teacher might hold the key to this mystery, so I approached his desk one afternoon like Apollo reaching the oracle of Delphi to ask him my burning question. He didn’t look up, but his bushy mustache twitched as he paused between marking red Xs on the paper he was grading. “Just divide 22 by 7.” My mouth was wide open as I slid out of the classroom in silence, stunned by the profound simplicity of his answer.

I rushed home that day, found the largest piece of paper I could find and began dividing 22 by 7. I was dividing like crazy for about an hour when I realized that the answer kept repeating in a pattern every 6 digits, 3.142857142857142857 and so on. I was broken, but not defeated. I figured that I could get the answer by working backwards. I found my Mother’s finest china plate, which I figured was the most perfect circle, and measured the circumference with a string and ruler. Then I measured the diameter and was planning to divide this into the circumference when my Dad walked into my bedroom.

He was perplexed, staring down at his son sitting in a pile of cardboard, string, tape, markers and fine china. “What are you doing, Billy?” I quickly thought up a few feasible stories, but settled on the truth. My Dad contemplated the situation. He was not a man who would dance around a topic. He was always able to cut through the murky waters of confusion with surgical precision and provide clarity where there was none, leaving everyone around him wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that?” He was an amazing problem-solver, so I anxiously awaited his assessment at that moment. “Billy, this is a futile exercise”, he calmly stated and walked out to of the room. I followed after him, shutting the door and throwing myself down on my bed. I rolled over, grabbed my dictionary from the dresser, and quickly looked up the definition of “futile”. Angrily, I opened the door and yelled, though not loud enough for anyone else to hear, “It is NOT futile!”