Why is “Pi” irrational?

Sincerely, Ingrid B.

Pi is irrational because of tradition. The Pi tradition originated over 2000 years ago with ancient Greek mathemeticians. They were a jovial bunch, these boys, and when they weren’t laying down the principles of geometry they were pulling pranks and making wagers with their fellow plebes. One unlucky junior mathemetician, his name lost to history, lost a vicious bet with a coworker and one morning, according to an account preserved in the British Museum, he was forced to take an ox-cart full of papyrus rolls to the outskirts of town and tie one roll to the city marker. He began writing a series of numbers on it, and when he reached the end he attached a new roll and continued. So he went until the roll reached the next town, which was two miles away. The terms of the wager, it seems, were that he had to connect the two towns with a single irrational number between three and four.

He must have succeeded, for the account goes on to describe a party he threw several years later as a junior accountant in Cathay. He had invited some colleagues to a raucous evening of drinking and carousing, and amidst the merry animal sacrifices and games of Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Soothsayer the partygoers would visit the Papyrus room, where their host had tucked away his massive irrational number for safekeeping. Impressed, they got roaring drunk and took their desserts into the back room to add their own digits to the roll. “Pontius, you do not yet make the pie random enough,” says one partygoer, blotting a page with a piece of pastry. “Stain the text with seven sevens!” “Yea, Aeschylus! Onward, O party!”

It was a hit, and it became an annual ritual with these desperate junior accountants who spent their days adding endless columns of meaningless numbers. Yearly they would gather to get drunk and discolor their “Pie” with desserts and random numbers, and it must have struck a nerve because a historical account written 200 years later notes that the “solemn ritual of the Pie” was still taking place every year in Cathay. On these holy days the Pie was taken from its special wing at the Alexandrian Library and paraded down the street, accompanied by flagellants and fire-eaters, while children scribbled numbers and threw ice cream at it.

In 300 A.D. the Pie disappeared. Scholars believe it was kidnapped to the Far East by a gang of crazed numerologists who believed it held the secret of creation. They dedicated their lives to studying it, searching endlessly for patterns or meaning in the digits. In 791 the appearance of the Pie was noted in Rajpur, India, where it acquired its first zero. (A cult member is quoted as saying “This Pie has no zot,” at which point he began schlepping them in with gusto.)

Over the centuries the Pie was transcribed to book form and traveled all over the Middle East. There seems to be no cultural center that it did not call home. Families in Kalat, Pakistan recall the Pie with great fondness, while residents of Meshed, Iran will spit in the face of anyone who so much as mentions Pie. The Gaziabak clan of Erzurum, Turkey, a world-weary culture, recall the Pie with indifference.

Thanks to the Crusades the Pie finally made it back to Grecian shores in 1171. The books were miraculously delivered to a Cathay accountant after being recovered from an English ship run aground after all aboard had died of a mysterious disease. The Greek peasants instantly recognized the list as the long-lost Pie of antiquity, and delivered it to the local accountants, who generations ago had simply started over after their original Pie had been stolen. The peasants were cowed in fear – bad luck, it seemed, was following this Pie. The accountants, on the other hand, who had spent all their lives thinking up new strings of random numbers, whooped with delight. Tacking their Pie onto the end of the old Pie, they happily closed their offices and took the rest of their lives off.

As the accounting firm grew over the years, more agencies were opened across Europe, and the company took great pride in using the Pie’s digits to link their various foreign offices, its numerals painted on ceramic tiles that stretched across valleys, swamps, and mountain passes.

The job of enlarging Pie has been passed from generation to generation among the families of Europe, although sadly most of these dedicated men and women were replaced by a Timex Sinclair computer in 1985. Today AT&T and the various Baby Bells have random-number generators working twenty-four hours a day thinking up new numbers for Pie.

Incidentally, the “e” in Pie was dropped in 1803 for obvious reasons.

Sincerely, Betty