Pi in the Sky

or, The Sword of Damocles.

In 2006 a friend of mine from high school went public with a unique form of art: hand-inked minuscule letters and numbers which, when viewed from afar, take on a larger form. His debut piece is Pi, the first 100,000 digits of the mathematical constant inked in a spiral. Each hand-drawn digit is about 1/8 of an inch high.


To celebrate his arrival on the art scene, Tyler Gregory sold prints of Pi, one of which we bought when we arrived in New York (for the perfect price of $314.15). The piece had appeal for both Sara and me: I enjoy cool art of all kinds; Sara was a math major in college. Late in 2006, Pi arrived on our doorstep, rolled up in a long box, and was promptly stashed in a closet. There it remained for four years. Until this week.


1,000 digits of pi take up a lot of room, no matter how small you print them. Pi is a single piece of paper 44 inches across. And there is only one accessible space in the house where the framed diameter of Pi will fit: over the bathroom door at the top of the stairs.




Having selected the dwelling place of Pi, I set to work on framing it. Two years ago a friend from the congregation at Nineveh made the wooden frame for Pi out of reclaimed barn boards. He did a wonderful job crafting them, but they have set in the corner of the living room for two years. Part of the motivation for framing Pi this week was the guilt of walking by that unassembled frame one too many times. How very sad for Tom's good gift to go unused!




Both rounds of window replacements gained me large plates of glass from picture windows. It just so happened (if you believe in coincidence) that the plate glass was the same size as Pi. Thus between the generosity of a friend and the divine providence of home renovations, a frame which, from a retailer, would likely have cost me in the hundreds of dollars cost me only a thank you and some elbow grease. Here's the assembly of glass and frame in the living room, done in stolen moments when toddler feet were not active:


After four years rolled up on the closet, Pi needed to spend some time getting the bends out. And my biblical commentaries got more use than most of them have seen in months:

A 44-inch square work of art in a wooden frame and a plate of heavy-duty glass together result in an assemblage which is, if nothing else, heavy. Since Pi was to be hung overhead and over a doorway, we procured the heaviest framing wire that the craft store peddled, and I ran double wires across the frame, connected both by eye screws and metal strapping. This baby isn't going anywhere:

After so much labor, Tyler Gregory's debut piece is ready to be hung:

It took two attempts at configuring the ladder and four hands lifting the 45-plus-pound artifact, but a last Pi found its proud place at the top of the stairs, from whence it will greet every visitor to our home:

Since our home is not an art gallery, it's not designed with optimal lighting for artwork. So perhaps the connoisseur had best view Pi from the upstairs living room:

There is a Greek legend about the king Dionysius and one of his courtiers, Damocles. Damocles thought it would be great to be king, so Dionysius gave him the position. But in order to give Damocles the feel of the pressures of royal life, he hung a sword, point down, by a single horse hair over the seat in which Damocles sat.

I couldn't help but think of that parable as we hoisted Pi up over the bathroom door. Yet I'm confident the weight of entering our bathroom will be nothing like the burden of Damocles, since we used steel instead of horse hair to hang it.

~ emrys