The treasures of memory . . .

                 The Days of the Month

     Thirty days hath September,
     April, June, and November;
     February has twenty-eight alone,
     All the rest have thirty-one,
     Excepting leap-year--that's the time
     When February's days are twenty-nine.
                                                       OLD SONG.

Yesterday, hoping to arrange my bookshelves in better order, behind other newer volumes I found an old friend:   Poems Every Child Should Know (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913).  On the title page an inscription indicating the book was a present to my Aunt Ruth on her tenth birthday.   The collection -- with its poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene Field and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and so many others -- got me to thinking how much I have enjoyed throughout my life the few poems I have memorized.  And finding the poem above reminded me how much I also have valued particular mnemonic devices for remembering critical information. 

This brief stanza gives thirteen digits of π:    See, I have a rhyme assisting
                                                        my feeble brain,
                                                        its tasks sometimes resisting.
 More poetry for π is available here.
  

Celebrate Pi -- write in Pilish

On 3/14/15 many of us will celebrate  π - day; for those who like to gaze on the digits of  π,  one hundred thousand of them are available here.  In honor of this upcoming special day I have composed a small stanza in Pilish (the language whose word-lengths follow the digits of  π ). 

3.  1  4  

Get a list,

 1  5  

I shout,

   9  2  6  5  3  5

Tomorrow is Pi Day

     Tomorrow is Pi Day and I offer no new poems but supply links to several previous posts.  Poetry of π may be found on 23 August 2010 (an "irrational sonnet" by Jacques Bens),  6 September 2010 (featuring work by Kate Bush,  Robert Morgan and Wislawa Szymborska),  10 September 2010 (mnemonics for π, especially from Mike Keith) , 15 March, 2011,(a poem by Lana Hechtman Ayers)  27 November 2011 (a poem by Brian McCabe) and 10 March 2013 (the opening lines of a poem "3.141592 . . ." by Peter Meinke).

Celebrate 3.14 with poems of Pi

     Soon this year's version of the date 3.14 will arrive.  Pi-day!
     At the 2012 Bridges Conference in Towson MD I had the opportunity to hear "Art of π," a presentation by Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya that told of ways that the special number π has inspired artists and writers.  This blog has previously celebrated π -- for example on 6 September 2010 (featuring work by Kate Bush,  Robert Morgan and Wislawa Szymborska),  10 September 2010 (mnemonics for π, especially from Mike Keith) , 15 March, 2011,(a poem by Lana Hechtman Ayers)  27 November 2011 (a poem by Brian McCabe). 

Rhymes help to remember the digits of Pi

Calculated at the website, WolframAlpha, here are the first fifty-nine digits of the irrational number π (ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter):

     π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749...

Before computers became available  to calculate π to lots of decimal places in an instant, people who did scientific calculations could keep the number easily available by memorizing some of the digits.  The website fun-with-words offers several mnemonics for  π , the most common type being a word-length mnemonic in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit. For example the sentence, "How I wish I could calculate pi," gives us the first seven digits.