Pi = I/S (Infinite Stories)

Today was a historic day in regards to the number Pi, a day that only comes once every hundred years! So everyone has been honoring the mathematical equations that use the irrational number to explain various philosophies and theories. Which, of course, also coincided with it being Albert Einstein's 136th Birthday and he developed quite a few famous theories, too! Tonight Frank and I watched The Theory of Everything with Eddie Redmayne in his Oscar winning performance playing Stephen Hawking. We both thoroughly enjoyed it....

Yet my favorite piece of Pi to consume and discuss (and I don't mean Pie for that would take me to Moody's Dinner in Maine or Duarte's Tavern in California), is that of The Life of Pi! When I first read Yann Martel's book, I finished it and instantly had to read it again. That is the one and only time I've done that and I've read thousands of books. You see there was an elegant method to his madness that I  didn't get, nor was any reader supposed to get, until the end.

You see the novel, as it's written, actually contains two stories. Although for 90% of the book, you are believing that you are reading only one story. It is not until the end, when the protagonist's, Pi's, story sounds too fantastic, as explained to the two investigators, that we hear another version of the story; same sequence, different characters, narrative, choices, conflicts and resolution. Masterful piece of math in the form of prose.

Basically Yann Martel took  Pi=c/d and turned it into a story:

 On one side of the diameter line is one story with the animals and Pi, and on the opposite side is the  of the humans and Pi. There is one story, the circle, and to find Pi, you must divide the circumference (c) the whole story, by the diameter (d) or the narrative. When I teach Life of Pi to my students, I emphasize that the two halves look like two boats  ~ life boats!

Now the elegant nature of this narrative is that it can become an infinite series depending narrative....it is limited only to the rational mind, in other words the imagination is infinite as long as we can follow the narrative and the irrational nature of it.

Most people when finishing reading The Life of Pi do the just that. They choose to believe the irrational over the rational. The novel's premise is that it will "make you believe in God" once you've heard/read Pi's story. Stephen Hawking's first wife believed in God. His first history of Time gave credence to a Grand Creator. It took him proving his first theory wrong, with highly irrational leaps of narrative, backed up by elegantly written formula's to prove the theory of Time, with a before and after or a beginning and end and no Grand Creator. Einstein, too, with his Theory of Relativity, and often quoted about his theories on religion and God (google them).

Now I'm not going to go the next steps with Singularity and String Theory, and I know I've skipped over the power of Fractals  (although this is a favorite as it elegantly measures nature, coastlines, buildings in a really cool way), but I am going to say that I do think we are our choices and the stories we tell. Sometimes we're rational, sometimes we're irrational and often we're somewhere in-between.

As I stated at the start, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. He had made a statement that isn't as often repeated as has views on God and Music. It has to do with facts and theories:

I think that is why storytelling is so appealing and why we have a new genre called Creative Nonfiction, under which Memoir now belongs and perhaps String Theory, too! We are creatures who re-member our lives and whose memories are faulty and yet we are determined to reason out why we are here and account for our time.


I'll sign off tonight with a letter from President Obama to Mr. Martel, which Obama wrote after finishing reading The Life of Pi:

Good Night, Storytellers and Scientists, G'night!