… and then I promise I’ll cut this out until next year!
Last year in the New York Times blog, John Tierney wrote about International Pi Day. (Which is, by the way, originally an invention of The Exploratorium in San Francisco.) He said:
The Exploratorium has gathered a few genres on its Pi Day site, including this limerick:
If inside a circle a line
Hits the center and goes spine to spine
And the line’s length is d
The circumference will be
d times 3.14159
These are his suggestions for writing your own odes to Pi:
You can write a traditional haiku about pi like this one:
Unending digits . . .
Why not keep it simple, like
Twenty-two sevenths?Or, for the ambitious, you can try a pi-ku that’s both a haiku and a mnemonic device in which the number of characters in each word equals the value of the corresponding digit of pi. Here’s an example that enables you to derive 11 digits of pi (3.1415926535) by counting the number of characters in each of the 11 words:
Let C over D
(Wheel perimeter on height)
Equal its value.Then, for the real purist, there’s a new form of pi-ku proposed by Ian Chillag of NPR: Instead of the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of haiku, honor pi with lines of 3, 1 and 4 syllables. Like:
Why is pi
Square
As pie is round?
Here is my own attempt at pi-ku, being silly and trying to make it erotic, of course — like my haiku.
Reciting
Pi,
math gets me hot.
I’m quitting now. Really.
The geekiest of the science/science fiction blogs say that the Chinese are reporting the invention of an “impossible drive” . The device is said to turn electrical impulses into microwaves, which in turn create thrust.
