Pi Days

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major spiritual experience, and the date mentioned by Browning in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." I linked to some old posts of mine (one of which was also recently linked to by WG in a comment) which mentioned July 22 as an alternative Pi Day, in connection with its being the release date of the Jordan Peele film NOPE.

At first I thought it was a sad near miss that Bill's birthday should be one Pi Day while mine is the day after the usual Pi Day. Upon reflection, though, I realized that the most precise approximation of pi on the calendar is actually the two-day period March 14-15, corresponding to 3.1415. I guess we could call that Pi Biduum, and it includes my birthday, the Ides of March.

The Ides of March is of course best known as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar. That name is another link to Browning's poem, which relates how the rats followed the Pied Piper

Until they came to the river Weser

Wherein all plunged and perished

-- Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,

Swam across and lived to carry

(As he the manuscript he cherished)

To Rat-land home his commentary,

My discovery of Pi Biduum made me wonder if anyone else had thought of it, so I ran a search for pi two days. This brought up the Wikipedia article for "Pi Day," which notes that June 28 is sometimes observed as Two-Pi Day. While visiting that page, I learned of yet another date for Pi Day: "Some also celebrate π on November 10, since it is the 314th day of the year."

Some minutes after learning the significance of November 10, I decided to read a little in the Book of Mormon. The last chapter I had finished was Alma 48, and so it happened that the very first verse I read included a reference to a date corresponding to our November 10:

And now it came to pass in the eleventh month of the nineteenth year, on the tenth day of the month, the armies of the Lamanites were seen approaching towards the land of Ammonihah (Alma 49:1).

This is the only mention of that particular date in all of scripture. That "approaching towards" is a bit of a sync, too, since none of these dates is anything but an approximation (literally a "coming near to") of the value of pi.

Update: After posting this, it occurred to me to check what, if anything, I had posted on the 10th day of the 11th month of the year '19. It turns out it was a pun post called "Near misses." The present post calls my failure to be born on Pi Day "a sad near miss."