In the middle of the night I found myself asking a very strange (for me) question: "How did (whoever it was) come up with the value of Pi?" That is a strange question to be in my mind because I don't spend much time thinking about math.

That wasn't the case with my father. My father was an engineer. He loved math. He was constantly "figuring." Both of his parents did the same. Both homes were littered with scraps of paper and newspapers that were covered with calculations. His mother would save the calculations made by her husband, and then in her spare moments would try to decipher what it was that her husband had been thinking about. This was her pastime.

Dad was a mathematician. His name was always at the top of the lists posted on the professor's office door where test results were displayed. That wasn't the case with me. I could do the math, but it was an effort. Sometimes I would go to Dad for help with a problem, but I quickly learned that his help was no help at all. I couldn't follow his explanations. He was a mathematician, but not a teacher.

Marjorie similarly went to her mother when she needed help with math. Zelma's advice was classic: "Oh, honey, don't worry about it. They'll be on to something different next week."

That was ever so true, but never mind about the need for prerequisite knowledge. Some of us have mathematical aptitudes, and some of us don't.

Why on earth should I wake up worrying about Pi? I have no idea, but here is what I've learned:

Pi is the magical number that is used to calculate the area of a circle. Pi is used everywhere. To understand anything involving a circle, a sphere, or a curve Pi is involved. Whether calculating the vastness of space or understanding the spiral of DNA, Pi is involved.

Possessing a knowledge of Pi came in handy for Thomas Condon, my 2nd great grandfather. One of the first jobs he took was as a teacher in Skaneateles, New York. A man there wanted to test the new teacher's abilities, and sent him a poetical problem:

"In the midst of a meadow well stored with grass,

I bought me an acre to feed my ass.

What length of rope will feed him all round,

On no more and no less than an acre of ground?"

Thomas took the challenge, and answered as follows:

"If in the midst of a meadow a pasture you'd take,

Whose area exactly an acre would make,

X feet of rope

Would just about give your due I should hope.

But your ass you must tie close by the nose,

Else all this our poetry better were prose.

For if for a holder you'd take his hind leg

The further, of course, he'll roam from the peg;

And you'd be to blame your friends thus to bother

Besides cheating your neighbor who sold you the fodder."

The Babylonians and Egyptians developed close approximations to Pi, but the Greek mathematician, Archimedes, is the one who first worked it out. That was in 250 B.C. He did it by drawing a hexagon inside a circle and a hexagon outside of the circle. He calculated the area of each, and then doubled the numbers of hexagons inside and outside of the circle. He kept doubling the hexagons and calculating their areas until he reached 96-sided polygons. This gave him the upper and lower limits of what Pi could be. He determined 3.14 as the first decimal points of Pi. This breakthrough began the never-ending calculations of this never-ending number.

Pi is actually found in the Bible in 1 Kings 7:23. "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about ... and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." Numbers are assigned to all Hebrew letters. Someone realized that multiplying 30 cubits by the sum of the numbers of the letters that make up the Hebrew word "line" in this verse equals 3.14. Perhaps this is a stretch, but of course God knew all about Pi before any of the rest of us did.

Today competitions are held to determine who can recite the most digits of Pi. This is known as piphilology. The world record was set by Thomas W. Ferguson in 2006 who recited Pi to over 3 million decimal places. (Why?) The competitions are generally held on Pi day, March 14th (3/14), which was declared National Pi Day in 2009 by the U.S. Congress.

Only the first 40 digits are needed to perform accurate calculations, but computers were used in 2022 to expand Pi to 100 trillion digits.

The number Pi is 3.141592653 ... That's 3 and 1/7 or the square root of 10. The possibilities of what Pi can do are as infinite as the number itself. There are many mathematical questions still open, so Pi never stops amazing us.

Pi is found by dividing the circumference of a circle by the length of its diameter. No matter the size of the circle, the value does not change, making Pi a mathematical constant. Pi is an irrational number with no end and no repeating digits.

Pi is represented by the symbol π, which is "p" in the Greek alphabet. Leonhard Euler first used the symbol in 1737, and it stuck.

Now if all of this is Greek to you, I want to tell about the first time I ran into this Euler guy. I first encountered him in what I thought was an amazing announcement in the BYU Daily Universe in 1973. The announcement read:  "Dr. Donald R. Snow will speak on 'Caratheodory's Approach to the Euler-Lagrange Partial Differential Equation for Multiple Integral Variational Problems' on Thursday at 4:10 p.m."

I'm sure the lecture was fascinating. The announcement was amazing to me because I understood not a word of it. I wouldn't have understood anything in the presentation, either. Maybe Zelma's approach to the matter is the best one, after all.