Pi Facts, page 4
The Pi Shawl
The late, great Elizabeth Zimmerman, known by many as the guru of knitting, designed a circular shawl called the "Pi Shawl," knitted from the center to the outside edge. You can see pictures of the pi shawl here
Pi Day Leiden
You may remember than Ludolph Van Ceulen spent many years in calculation, and by the time he died in 1610 he had found 35 decimal digits of pi. Those digits were engraved on his headstone, which unfortunately has been lost. On July 5, 2000, a special service was held in the city of Leiden, the Netherlands, commemorating Ludolph Van Ceulen and his devotion. Maarten Willems was on hand, and wrote: "The event was very well organised and there was a surprisingly great interest, both in audience (an estimated 400 people in the afternoon; about 750 people that night) and in the press. There even was an item on pi on national television!"
Below: A replica of the Van Ceulen tombstone, installed at the Leiden pi
day.
Pi Poetry
Dena R. Bortman wrote this poem after reading the article about the Chudnovsky brothers in the New Yorker magazine:
Pi
Round bellied and
cavern-eyed,
the Mathematician
concocts and conceives
his master computer
to divine God's riddle in
the Circle--
a satellite - he
Radiates for revelation
in the rhythm of the
peaks and crags
at the edge of the mountainous universe:
Circumference Divided by Diameter,
Circumference Divided by Diameter.
In this sacred separation
He will never be able
to touch or hold
five hundred million places
into forever,
feel the breath of God
whisper at his lips,
rattle his ribcage
to the symphony
of intimate numbers.
But he douses and descries,
aiming his desire
at the nearest galaxy:
Give me the End, He cries,
Cease this Swirling-
I Command you
to take me Home!
