In honor of Pi Day, we have to address everyone's favorite irrational number. One of the areas where pi coincides with society is in the written word. Well, not really. While pi is found in many places, it is not found in many societal situations. Instead, we often have to bring pi into our lives, consciously, and sometimes even as a constraint.
And the clearest place is in the world of Pilish. Pilish is a style of writing where the number of letters in each word corresponds to the consecutive digits of pi. For example, "How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" corresponds nicely to 3.14159265358979. And the first book entirely written in Pilish was published two years ago, titled Not a Wake. Here is an interview, also conducted in Pilish, with its author.
But what of the everyday written word? Specifically, what is the longest incidence of accidental Pilish? If we were to go looking for pi in our regular language we might find some long accidental Pilish texts. Nick FitzGerald set out to discover just that, through an analysis of the entire Gutenberg corpus.
And he found, surprisingly (and disappointingly, from my perspective), that the longest case of accidental Pilish is quite short: only eight digits. Here is the chart of his results:
I thought that maybe less formal writing might be more likely to contain accidental Pilish, due to shorter words, so I ran FitzGerald's Pilish detector program on a text message corpus. Alas, I only found a Pilish fragment of length 5.
Perhaps other types of writing, or even other languages, are more conducive to accidental Pilish. Maybe Stephen Wolfram could check his e-mail archives for Pilish?
*Update: *FitzGerald wrote in with some fun additional information:
Top Image: Jorel Pi/Flickr/CC
