It’s coming! Are YOU ready?

No, I’m not talking about Global Warming.
(This one is for you, Mary Jo.)

Pi Day will be celebrated Wednesday, March 14th. Are you ready? (For the record, I believe some of the folks cited in the article have just way too much time on their hands. Or perhaps it's a result of long winters and cabin fever. THAT I can understand.)

This is a story about love. About inscrutable complexity and remarkable simplicity, about the promise of forever. It is about obsession and devotion, and grand gestures and 4,000-word love letters.

It is about a curious group of people with an almost religious zeal for a mind-numbing string of numbers. Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known _ so far _ to be more than one trillion digits long.

They are the acolytes of the church of pi.

Some go to great lengths to prove their devotion to this simple yet elegant number.

This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan, puts it: "What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi."

He said this one day last fall after accurately reciting pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours. He does not hold the Guinness world record, only because he has not submitted the required documentation to Guinness. But he has his story.

(Incidentally, the world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness.)

Even at 100,000 decimal places, Mr. Haraguchi has a way to go. Pi is a non repetitive (so far as we know) decimal expressing the ratio of the diameter of a circle and its circumference.

Supercomputers have computed pi to more than a trillion decimal places, looking always for a pattern to unlock its mystery. And for centuries the number has fascinated mathematicians.

That’s one trillion decimal places. 1,000,000,000,000 decimal places.

There are logical gathering places for people like this, and one of them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, on March 14, students have been known to wish each other _ out loud _ a happy Pi Day.

The school plays a role in encouraging this: In the past it has tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn't work out this year. And last year, when an MIT official wrote on an admissions blog that it probably wouldn't work out then either, he was greeted with disappointment. "Pi Day seems so romantic," one prospective student wrote.)

There's a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes "3.14159." (It rhymes with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!"

A bit nerdy perhaps…okay, VERY nerdy.