Piems
A piem is a poem whose word lengths spell out the digits of pi. They're the most charming mnemonic device in mathematics, and the tradition is older than you'd think.
How piems work
The rule is simple: the number of letters in the n-th word equals the n-th digit of pi. So a piem starts with a 3-letter word ("How"), then a 1-letter word ("I"), then a 4-letter word ("want"), and so on. A word representing the digit 0 is usually a 10-letter word, though some piems just skip or use punctuation conventions.
The classic piem
How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
— Sir James Jeans
That gives you 3.14159265358979 — the first 14 digits of pi, enough for almost any back-of-napkin calculation. Notice how "alcoholic" has 9 letters, "of" has 2, "course" has 6, and so on.
A longer piem
Now I — even I — would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan, rivaled nevermore,
Who in his wondrous lore,
Passed on before,
Left men his guidance how to circles mensurate.
— Adam C. Orr (1906)
Orr's piem extends to 30 digits: 3.14159265358979323846264338327. The "Syracusan" is Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse, Sicily, and first rigorously bounded pi using inscribed polygons.
"Cadaeic Cadenza" — the epic piem
The longest piem ever written, Cadaeic Cadenza by Mike Keith (1996), spells out 3,835 digits of pi across a short story written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. Keith later wrote an entire book, Not A Wake, encoding 10,000 digits of pi in standard English prose and poetry.
Write your own piem
Piems are a delightful creative constraint. Grab the first 10 digits of pi (3.141592653) and try to write a grammatical English sentence where the word lengths match. It's much harder than it looks — and when it works, it's unreasonably satisfying.
- 1-letter words: a, I, O
- 2-letter words: an, to, of, my, do
- 3-letter words: how, the, sea, sky, pie
- 4-letter words: want, moon, star, love, mind
- 5-letter words: drink, music, earth, logic, crown