Recently I came across a link I had saved to an article from last June in the Washington Post -- an article that considers Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and the scope of his influence. Poe's poem "Sonnet -- To Science" was posted in this blog at this link back in October, 2013 but today, as Pi-Day (3.14) approaches, I am thinking of his poem, "The Raven." Mathematician Mike Keith has written a version of "The Raven" in Pilish, an arrangement of words whose lengths follow the digits of Pi (when the digit 0 occurs, a 10-letter-word is used); the complete Pilish version is found at this link. Here are its opening lines:
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| 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716 . . . . |
My own attempts at Pilish are much more modest and today I quote from a posting in March, 2018:
Hug a tree, I shout -- hungering to defend trees
and every creation . . .
In San Francisco, the Exploratorium Museum -- which reports that it invented Pi Day to honor not only Pi but also to remember Albert Einstein's Birthday -- will celebrate the holiday with programs that feature John Sims, a mathematical artist (and also someone who has been previously noted in this blog).
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