http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Commodore%20Skahill/Colin%20McEnroe%20Show%2003-14-2011.mp3
It's Pi Day, and we have to ask, can numbers be sexy?
Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia is being revived on Broadway right now. I saw it Friday night. Much of the play is about a young math genius, a girl living 200 years ago, who writes in her notebook:
"I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through numbers alone."
She asks her tutor:
"God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?"
Well, numbers are written in nature, especially our friend Pi. As Richard Preston wrote in the New Yorker 20 years ago: Pi hides in the rainbow, and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water pi emerges in the spreading rings.
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