The Grinch Who Hated Pi Day

[1] "Every kid in the classroom liked Pi Day a lot / But the Grinch in the faculty lounge— / did not!" [A Pi Day Party poster: 3/14]

[2] "This, to the Grinch, was the dumbest of seasons, / and asked or unasked, he would rattle off reasons: / 'In the U.S. it's said the date 3 slash 14 / is March the 14th. That's what 'Pi Day' must mean. / But the rest of the world gives the day, then the month! / so 3 slash 14 is the 3rd of Kerplumph, / a month, I assure you, that does not exist. / And that is just one of the gripes on my list." [A calendar for the 14th month, Kerplumph; a mug: "#1 Pedant, insofar as pedantry can be placed on an ordinal scale"]

[3] "This horrible day that transfixes the nation, / is built on a lousy approximi-zation. / 22 over 7 comes closer to pi. / So let's wait till that date out in mid-late-July." [Number line: 3.14 is farther from π than 22/7]

[4] "Besides which, old pi is an artifact now. / The cool mathematicians all venerate tau." [π ≈ 3.14 radii per semicircle; τ ≈ 6.28 radii per circle]

[5] "And have I brought up / how it eats me alive, / the 3 point 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5? / How it just rambles on, / and it fills me with hate, / 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8! / All those meaningless digits! / The hot wasted breath! / Oh, it bores me to tears. / No, it bores me to death." [Students singing digits]

[6] "I've said it before and I'll say it again: / Those numbers mean nothing outside of base ten. / Besides which, the digits are ones no one needs. / Past thirty or forty, they're useless as thneeds. / For a circle a million light years in width, / your digits could stop at the mere twenty-fifth, / and still you could calculate out the circumference / down to the span of a nano-non-umference, / a distance one thousandth the width of a hair. / For digits past that, I quite simply don't care." [Digits of pi, fading out]

[7] "I'm speaking the truth when I firmly assert: / Pi Day's an excuse to swap math for dessert." [Students at a table of pies]

[8] "And what happened then? / In some circles, they say, / The Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. / And elsewhere, they say / that it grew a bit more: / maybe 3 point 1 sizes. / or 3 point 1 4…"