Celebrate the sum of us. In its primeval poetic context, Pi represents a confluence of civilisations, the arts & science: mathematics & music, silence & sound, light and dark, sacred and sacrilegious, shadows & streams of subconscious.
Dr Kris Rampersad, Musings on Pi Day, 3.14 2022
As the 14th day of the 3rd month, it’s International Pi Day.
It also marks the death of Stephen Hawking in 2018 with whose cosmos I collided for a for a brief space in time at Cambridge and the birth of the godfather of western physics, Albert Einstein (1879) of under whose Cambridgeshire apple tree I also meditated.
Represented as a Greek letter for p, or ? and as the mathematical value 3.14. Contesting cultural claims as to its origins, distort its profound significance of perfection and the value of its antiquity as the golden ratio, the divine proportions.
Pi, in modern/western discourse is heavily shrouded in mathematics and obscure science. But in its ancient primeval contexts, Pi represents a confluence of the arts and science, the sacred and sacrilegious, : music and mathematics, silence and sound, light and dark, shadows and colours, poetry, rhythm, meter as captured in the formulae of Story Science.
This is evident, but missed in most translations and linguistic scrutiny of knowledge and application of the PI value 3.141 in such treatise as those articulated by Indian astronomer Aryabhata in the fifth century (499 AD).
They struggle to embrace and encompass the spatial and metaphysical relations and alliances that merge and emerge into equality at the horizons of expanding concentric circles of physical spatial and metaphysical relations and alliances.
The Mathematics it represents encompasses human social behaviour and the direct co-relation and interlocking of physical and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.
The knowledge is as old as the timeless Upanishads passed on through oral knowledge traditions into texts. It prescribes and aligns cosmic and physical universe with human social practices, rituals and conducts. It includes and guides precise astrologically and astronomically assessed times for actions/rituals called jyotisa, and the exact mode of performance and presentation, called kalpa.
In it blends tangible and intangible heritage. Aryabhata, considered the great grand sire of Pi incorporated into his representations not just the formulaic but also modes of transmission and methods of instruction (shiksa) that includes pronunciation and articulation, meter, beat and rhythm, called chandas and critical assessment and analyses that incorporate grammar and syntax known as vyakarana, and lexicon or nirukta.
The quintessential application of Pi, to me, is not just in its numerical and mathematical value but in its celebration of the sum of us. It is the confluence of our modern and ancient intellectual heritage. In its primeval poetic context, Pi represents a confluence of civilisations, the arts & science: mathematics & music, silence & sound, light and dark, sacred and sacrilegious, shadows & streams of subconscious. Delve into the sacred and sacrilegious mysteries of divine proportions in the golden ratio. Experience the Ancestral Art Science Mathematics and Cosmology of Pi – Happy International Pi Day!