Our Torah is sweeter than honey. Within it, you can find all the secrets of creation.

I’m going to share with you something that none of the math or geophysics professors in MIT or Cal Tech know, nor does anyone on the staff at NASA. Now hear this from your buddy Lazer:

I think there might be a reason they won’t tell you these things—but anyway, why make the facile assumption that nobody who works in science or engineering or mathematics is a Jew who takes this sort of stuff seriously?

Pi is the secret of creation. Kabbalah, our esoteric portion of Torah passed on to us by Rabbi Yitzchak Luria Ashkenazi (the famed “Arizal”) and his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital, may their holy memories arouse mercy on us,

(Yes, he did actually write ‘arouse mercy on us’. I am not making this up.)

explains that Ain Sof, Hashem The Infinite, created the world by a process known as tzimtzum, or contraction, whereby Hashem had to designate a point in the middle of his Divine and all-encompassing light to make room for a physical universe. This process, super simplified, was done by hishtalshelut, a series of cocentric [sic] circles the correspond to each of the sefirot, the holy spheres that mainifest [sic] Hashem’s different attributes.

Okay, whatever. It’s the conclusion that our sage mathematician/kabbalist comes to immediately after this point that really blows my mind:

Therefore, nothing in creation is square. All of creation is round, from electrons and protons to the great galaxies.

Nothing is square? Everything is round? What about: squares, cubes, right angles, television sets, sofas, stereo speakers, pianos, and books (sorry, seforim), just to name a few things? Also, many galaxies have shapes other than circles. But if you’re intent on making a silly, poorly-informed point, I guess you can’t let little details like these stop you.

A magical number, the key to computing circles, diameters, and circumferences is Pi, or 3.14 with subsequent fractional digits to infinity.

The Holy Name that Hashem used and uses (for creation is renewed every single day) in the contraction process is שד”י, the Hebrew name Shaddai, which is made up of 3 letters, shin, dalet, and yud.

All Hebrew letters have a numerical value. Shin is 300, yud is 10, and dalet is 4. Together, the Holy Name of Shaddai equals 314. If we divide this number by 100, the number that signifies perfection - which only Hashem is - we get 3.14, or pi, the secret of creation.

All right, so if you add up the letters you get an approximation of pi times a hundred. So you have to divide by a hundred to get a meaningful result out of this. What’s the justification for doing this? You could come up with so many other than ‘it signifies perfection’. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader. But more important—and interestingly, from my point of view—is the fact that unless you believe in some form of the documentary hypothesis—which I presume Lazer does not—the name Shaddai leads you into all sorts of contradictions. For a terrific example, see Exodus 6.3 and Genesis 22:14, which seems to suggest that Abraham knew the name ‘Yahweh’ (translated as ‘the LORD’). Also, Shaddai seems to have been a Mesopotamian cult title of one of the Semitic chief gods El. For a useful point of comparison, see Psalm 82, which begins: ‘God (elohim) stands in the congregation of El‘ (god? El? could this mean the council of gods under El?). At any rate, this is quite a vexed issue, much more complicated that Lazer is making it.

However, these are but minor obstacles to the determined mind of our esteemed rabbi. If he wants to believe that pi is holy, mystical, and the secret to knowledge of creation, then by all means let him go ahead and believe it. The rest of us will keep on thinking that it’s pretty neat in its own right—or, if not, then at least an opportunity to hold a demonstration.

Photos courtesy of Ian Gowen, University of Oregon. Licenced and used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Today’s date expressed in DDMMYYYY format (14032008) occurs 9,209,525 digits after the decimal point in the value of pi.

I am going to make pie for dessert tonight. It will be ten inches (25.4 cm) in diameter at its base, and therefore, my slide rule informs me, 31.4 inches (79.8 cm) in circumference, since circumference of a circle is its diameter times pi. It will be 78.5 square inches (about 506 square cm) in surface area at its base, since surface area of a circle is calculated by multiplying the square of its radius (half its diameter) by pi. But, you ask, how much pie is there really? This is a bit more complicated and involves trigonometry (gasp!).

To find the volume of our pie, we have to go back to our high school math and remember our geometry and trig. This calculation is a bit trickier since the pie’s edges are (mostly) slanted, making it a frustum of a cone. To calculate the volume, then, we simply subtract the volume of the smaller from the larger cone, leaving the volume of the pie as the difference. The formula for the volume of a cone is one third of its height (from the tip to the centre of the circle at the base), times the square of its base’s radius, times pi. However, we don’t know the height of the cones, since these cones are only imaginary (in the metaphysical, not the mathematical, sense). Visualize the cones, in cross-section, as a triangle. The radius of the base of the smaller triangle is 5.00 inches, and we can use a protractor to find out that the base angle is 70 degrees exactly. Trigonometry tells us that the ratio of the two legs of a right triangle is given by the tangent of the angle opposite, so taking the tangent of 70° and multiplying by 5.00 gives us the height, which is 13.74 inches. This means that the volume of the smaller cone is 359.71 cubic inches. Because angles cut by a transversal on the same side of the transversal and parallel lines are congruent, the angle of the base of the larger triangle (the top of the pie) is also 70°. My ruler shows that the depth of the pie tin is 2.5 inches, so assuming the pie rises and is baked properly, we can use 2.5 inches as the height of the frustum. Add it to 13.74 from the height of the smaller cone and we get a total height of 16.24 inches. We now find the tangent of 70° and divide the total height by it, since we want to find the length of the radius of the base of the triangle. This yields a radius of 5.9 inches across the top of the pie, which allows us to calculate a volume of 592 cubic inches for the larger cone. Subtract the volume of the smaller cone and we get a volume of 232 cubic inches, or about 3800 cubic centimetres.

I will post a picture of this insane amount of pie in all its tasty glory once the baking is complete. (Blueberry filling, I don’t think I mentioned yet.) Whee!

Google Calculator is pretty nifty, and able to handle some rather complex high-level (i.e. English-like) syntax. For example, it handles 1.190 CAD per litre in USD per gallon quite nicely, to let you figure out just how much that tank of gas you bought this afternoon cost (the answer, if you can’t be arsed to click on the link, is about USD$4.55—that’s what you get for having high oil prices combined with the recent woes of Alberta oil companies), compared with what they’re paying in the States (more than a dollar less, on average, per gallon). And Google Calculator is pretty awesome for this sort of thing.

But try stringing together several conversions, and even though it gets the parentheses right, it still utterly fails. The calculation 1.19 CAD per litre per 16 litres should parse as 1.19 $/L x 16 L, which reduces to $(1.19 x 16), but the calculator fails utterly on the calculation. Just look at the ridiculous answer: 75,111.0894 USD/metres to the sixth power! U.S. dollars weren’t even mentioned, and metres to the sixth power?? Now I truly understand what they mean by ‘a higher plane of existence’.

How do we arrive at this number? (By scribbling arithmetic all over the back of an interlibrary loan request form while I should have been filling out said form for research purposes, naturally.) Well, Frederic declares to Mabel that ‘In 1940 I of age shall be,’ referring to his 21st birthday, at which point he would have lived 88 years. But, you say, there are four years between leap years, and 21 times 4 is 84, so how do we get 88? Because 1900 was not a leap year. It is not clear whether Gilbert and Sullivan were under the misapprehension that it was. If they believed it was, then Frederic would have been born in 1856 and celebrated his eleventh birthday on the nonexistent day of 29 February 1900. But since 1900 did not contain an intercalary day, Frederic would of necessity have been born in 1852, thus making him 88 in 1940 and 156 today, his 38th birthday. (That 1900 did not contain a leap year is the reason the old Macintosh system epoch was chosen for 1 January 1904, to ’save a half dozen instructions in their leap-year checking code.’) On the other hand, if Frederic did somehow manage to celebrate a birthday in 1900, then he would have been born in 1856, and the multiplication would come out all nice and pretty to 84 years on his 21st birthday in 1940.

I find it hard to believe that G&S would have let poor Frederic live eight years between his eleventh and twelfth birthdays (1896 and 1904); therefore they must have erroneously believed that 1900 was a leap year and set his birthday in 1856. Then again, I also find it hard to believe that everybody would just take Ruth at her word when she reveals that the pirates are in fact simply fallen noblemen, so what do I know. However, the canon evidence, such as it is, is that Frederic celebrates his 21st birthday in 1940, making today his 38th birthday. He is therefore 156, or possibly 152, more or less (but rather less than more).

How quaint the ways of Paradox!