Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 13, 2015

Examining the Allure of a Magic Number From the Talmud to Maimonides to Mr. Spock

Anya Ulinich

Published March 13, 2015.

In an episode of the original Star Trek, Mr. Spock played by the late, great Jewish actor Leonard Nimoy commands an evil computer that has taken over the life support system of the Starship Enterprise to compute Pi to the last digit. Spock therefore outwitted the murderous cyborg, which wound up self-destructing, because, as Spock explained, the value of Pi is a transcendental figure without resolution. Being totally logical, Spock wasnt suggesting that Pi had some sort of spiritual quality of transcendence. Rather, transcendental is a math term, and Im going to spare you the definition in hopes that you keep reading beyond this paragraph. But in spite of Spock and his logic, Pi just may have a spiritual quality of transcendence.

The circumference of a circle is always 3.14 x its diameter. Except 3.14 what we now call Pi is only an approximation. The decimals actually keep flowing. Pi is not only an irrational number its infinite and ultimately unknowable. Yet while the number itself always evades our grasp, we also know that its always true and always reliable. Pi always expresses the mathematical relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, no matter how small or how large the circle.

And we know this not from computations of the digital age. The ancients were onto this from the beginning. Every major civilization had its theories of Pi and its mathematicians who tried to explain it. Ancient Egypt and Babylon and India. The Greek Archimedes, the Greco-Roman Ptolemy, the ancient Chinese and Indians all figured out this ratio, which exists both on paper and, as if by some sort of divine plan, throughout nature.

The relationship between a circles diameter a line running straight through cutting it into two equal halves and its circumference the distance around the circle was originally mentioned in the Hebrew Book of Kings in reference to a ritual pool in King Solomons Temple. The relevant verse (1 Kings 7:23) states that the diameter of the pool was ten cubits and the circumference 30 cubits. In other words, the Bible rounds off Pi to about three, as if to say thats good enough for horseshoes and swimming pools.

Later on, the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud, who knew that the one-third ratio wasnt completely accurate, had a field day with the Bible having played fast and loose with the facts, arguing in their characteristic manner that of course it depended on whether you measured the pool from the inside or the outside of the vessels wall. They also had fun with some of the Gematria the numerical value of the words in the original passage, which when you play around with them a bit indeed come a lot closer to the value of Pi, spelling it out to several decimal points.

The great Maimonides later chimed in on this discussion with what reads almost like a warning not to dig too deeply into the mystery of Pi. The ratio of the diameter of the circle and its circumference are unknown and can never be discussed with accuracy, he wrote in the 12th century. This is not a lack of knowledge on our part, as the idiots think, but rather it is that by its nature this thing is unknown, and by virtue of its reality cannot be known, and it is not possible to speak of it its actual value cannot be perceived. Inscrutable. Unknowable. Unapproachable. Kind of like God. No man sees my face and lives, as He told Moses.

In his 1998 debut feature, Pi, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky had some fun with all this when he had a group of Hasidim kidnap his protagonist a tormented mathematical genius named Max Cohen in order to help them divine a hidden mathematical code inside the Torah, which they believed would reveal the lost name of God. Instead, Cohen went bonkers and took a power drill to his skull.

Link:

The Secret Jewish History of Pi

Category: Talmud
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