Geeks circle for Pi Day

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, March 11, 2007

This is a story about love.

It is about a curious group of people with an almost religious zeal for a string of numbers. Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known – so far – to be more than one trillion digits long.

They are the acolytes of the church of pi.

And once a year, many of them gather to talk about pi, rhapsodize about it, eat pi-themed foods (yes, including pie), have pi recitation contests and, just maybe, feel a little less sheepish about their unusual passion.

That day falls on Wednesday this year: March 14. Or 3.14. Obviously.

The question is why, of course. And if you ask the fans of pi why, a startling number of them will come back with the same question: “Why climb Mount Everest?” Because it’s there.

But they also admire the beauty of a number that seems to go on forever and yet has no discernible pattern. They savor the valor of memorization, challenging oneself to always know more.

This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan, puts it: “What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi.”

He said this one day last fall after accurately reciting pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours. He does not hold the Guinness world record because he has not submitted the required documentation to Guinness. But he has his story.

(Incidentally, the world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness.)

A brief math refresher: Pi is a simple concept, the relationship between a circle’s circumference and diameter: Multiply the diameter by pi – 3.14159, to use a crude approximation that would make many of the people in this story blanch – and you get the circumference.

Supercomputers have computed pi to more than a trillion decimal places, looking always for a pattern to unlock its mystery. And for centuries, the number has fascinated mathematicians.

And then there are people like Marc Umile. Twelve years ago, while working as an usher at a Philadelphia opera house, he picked up a book about mathematical curiosities and read about pi’s seemingly infinite random string.

He wondered about applying the way we absorb music to the number. An obsession was born. In 2004 Umile read the digits of pi into a tape recorder. He did it a thousand at a time and gave it a rhythm – some numbers high-toned, some low.

He listened to the tape constantly. This went on for two years.

“To and from work, in my quiet time, on my lunch break – and when I didn’t have the tape I would recite in the shower,” he says. “Probably 40 percent of the time there was an earphone in my ear. I said, ‘Oh my God, what have I created?’ “

What he created was what is believed to be a U.S. record for pi memorization – 12,887 digits. He typed them into a spreadsheet at a Philadelphia law office – three and a half hours, 1,000 numbers at a time, with two smoke breaks.

Umile, who is 40 and now works as a Medicare biller, believes the fascination with pi has something to do with our desire to learn the ultimate truth of something. Each decimal place, in theory, takes you 10 times closer to the answer.

There are logical gathering places for people like this, and one of them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, on March 14, students have been known to wish each other – out loud – a happy Pi Day.

The school plays a role in encouraging this: In the past it has tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn’t work out this year. And last year, when an MIT official wrote on an admissions blog that it probably wouldn’t work out then, either, he was greeted with disappointment. “Pi Day seems so romantic,” one prospective student wrote.)

There’s a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes “3.14159.” (It rhymes with “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!” And Bryan Owens, an MIT senior, says the ability to recite pi is a sort of bragging right, a coin of the realm.

“It’s like how much money you have,” he says. “But you never win. You always find somebody who knows it to more digits than you do. I think the basic idea is we like to celebrate things, kind of celebrate who we are.”

And that is why, like the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day or Italians on Columbus Day, this Wednesday, 3-14, in many cases at 1:59 p.m., pi enthusiasts will have their moment in the sun.