My 3.14 Day Poem*

 

With thanks to Abbie Taylor,
who told me about Pi Day Poems,
and to Shakespeare, whose sonnet
provided the form.

 Anti-Ode on Pi

 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou‘rt such a strange shape, legs much like a chair,

A top so curved there’s just no stinkin’ way

It’d seat a current Cabinet secretaire

Or former. Neither dost thou have a crust

Of lard and flour or crumbled crackers graham

That Grandma or Nabisco make, or just

Some chocolate or a blob of strawb’ry jam.

Thou art a cold, hard number made to hurt,

Confuse, and boggle students young and old,

A plethora of digits that exert

Thy pow’r and squeeze, with rude and vile chokehold.

Thou three point one four one six, now I say

I’ll not compare thee to a summer’s day.

 

 

 

 

 

For the poem’s sake, 3.1416, rather than 3.14159, is used in the third stanza. Because it is not March 14, 2016 (3-14-16), 3.14 is used in the title.

 

 

 

To see 100,000 digits of pi, go to http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html

To see 1,000,000 digits of pi, go to http://www.piday.org/million/   (This page just goes on and on.)

 

 

 

Photograph: Mosaic outside the Mathematics Building at the Technical University of Berlin.