Pi and the Seductions of Infinity

This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. “My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters. Since ancient times, human beings have been enchanted by the immutable relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, no matter the circle’s size. Today, we have a symbolic form for that mathematical relationship: π — an ancient Greek letter conferred upon it by a Welsh mathematician in the first years of the eighteenth century, though it was the ancient Greeks themselves who first began thinking mathematically about the mysterious number. The… read article