About Pi is Fun

A kid with too many interests

When I was in elementary school, I'd ride my bike to the library and spend hours there. What was I doing? Mostly trying to use computers to dig up anything I could about new and exciting roller coasters — this was the start of the roller-coaster boom that really took off in the late 1990s. I was fascinated by computers and by roller coasters in roughly equal measure, and growing up in Pennsylvania I got to watch those two worlds crash into each other. It was enchanting.

Okay — but isn't this site about π? I'm getting there.

School was hard

As much as I loved computers and coasters, I was a lot less enamored with school. Elementary school was painful. I didn't like being there, I struggled, and I'd rather have been trading Pogs at lunch than sitting in class — not because I wasn't curious. I wanted to learn. I just wasn't grasping things, and I hated feeling like I was the only kid in the room who didn't get it.

That changed in 4th grade. My teacher found some ways in for me, and I discovered the rush of actually being good at something. That turned into a pattern for the rest of my life: I just needed a crack in the concept, something to wedge a toe in. Once I had enough to get started, I could run with it.

The summer between 4th and 5th grade I signed up — voluntarily! — for a summer-school math class taught by the person who'd be my 5th grade teacher. We built things with our hands and then tied what we'd built back to the math. That little crack from 4th grade burst wide open. It changed everything.

Falling for geometry

Fast-forward a few years and I absolutely fell in love with geometry. There's something special about it compared to the subjects that come after — trigonometry and calculus. Geometry is intuitive: you can literally see it in the real world. And you can prove it. For someone who learns by seeing and doing, like me, that was perfect.

One of my favorite memories is a day I finished a proof on the whiteboard in fewer steps than my teacher used. She probably didn't love being shown up, but our shared enthusiasm for the subject made it a connection rather than a grudge. I was fascinated by how much you could do before you even had to reach for sine, cosine, or tangent.

In my senior year of high school I signed up for a class called Honors Space Geometry. Never heard of it? I wouldn't expect you to. It was a class unique to my district — the teacher who taught it had written the textbook himself. And I mean written. It's a literally handwritten textbook. I still have mine. What a cool class that was.

The thing about circles

Geometry classes don't usually start with circles, and there's a good reason: triangles are easier. You can pull out a protractor, measure the angles of a bunch of different triangles, add them up, and convince yourself that they always make 180°. Circles are trickier. If I had any frustration with geometry, it was that we didn't spend enough time on them.

Later I understood why. Some of the ideas hiding inside circles — especially π — are genuinely hard, and teachers have sensible reasons to tread carefully.

Why π is weird (in a good way)

π is an irrational number. That means its decimal expansion never repeats and never ends. Sit with that for a second. The ratio of a circle's edge to its diameter — this single geometric fact, something you can almost measure with a piece of string — turns out to be a number that cannot be written down completely, ever, by anyone.

Wrap your head around that and you're suddenly thinking about infinity, probability, and what counts as a "real" thing. Great material for a college philosophy class. I can see why a high school teacher might decide not to throw every 10th grader into the deep end of it. But those questions opened up the world for me.

The idea that pure mathematics is allowed to have numbers with no obvious practical use is delightfully strange. Why keep calculating more digits? A lot of the time, because we can — and because it's interesting. But funny thing: as we've pushed computer science further, we keep finding uses for math that started out as pure curiosity. Sometimes, though, it really is just for fun. That's allowed too.

Why this site exists

In the end, I became a computer programmer. I love building things, and with modern AI tools I now have the means to build things that I hope will help other people — without needing every project to turn into a business. This site is one of those.

I hope you enjoy it. I hope it grows your understanding of π and gives you a jumping-off point for more. The goal here isn't to be a definitive source on π. It's to be a gateway.

Enjoy the site — and if there's something you think would be helpful to add or change, let me know.