At the request of friends and family, and to clarify a conversation I recently had with Swerdloff (btw, you know how important content is. You used to rule with content. Your site is all 2.oh, but there isn’t a "there" there. Photos are cool. Events are nice. Prose and poetry are better! I have spent the last four years teaching that concept, which I feel I learned from you.) I present below my "The Story of π: A Prose Formula for Naming My Dog (Show Your Work)".

The first part was pretty easy. π was whelped on March 14, 2006. March 14 is π Day every year. My brother, the math teacher, earned "Teacher of the Month" for March because of his in-class π Day celebrations, including pie and measuring the circumference and area of said pies.

So π is an irrational number. Irrational numbers are numbers which cannot be written as a fraction, but are not imaginary numbers. This is a pretty fair description of him. I honestly haven’t attempted any form of rational discourse with the dog. Or relationship on that end consists of me giving him what I want to give, and his unconditional acceptance thereof.

π is also a real number. Real numbers are any numbers that are either rational or irrational.

π is always a hit with the under 13 crowd. I probably has something to do with his size. The neighborhood kids always start shouting his name when they see my car driving by. He’s something of a local celelbrity.

π and I went to DC to visit my sister and some friends over the Labor Day weekend. While there, we hiked the Billy Goat trail at Great Falls. On this particular hike, lots of people asked about π Two little girls asked what kind of dog he was. I told them he was a shiba inu. Their eyes got real wide and they exclaimed in unison, "I thought they were imaginary!" Apparently, they had played quite a bit of Nintendogs™, but having never seen a shiba in real life had assumed that the authors had taken some artistic liberties. This is how I now justify my claim that π can indeed be imaginary.

When a number has a part that is both real and imaginary, that number is called a complex number. My dog is the only instance of π that is a complex number. The label of complex definitely fits this dog!

Finally, some numbers are transcendental. "A real or complex number is called Transcendental number if it cannot be obtained as a result of an algebraic equation with integer coefficients." (Wikipedia) π is a transcendental number. π is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a transcendental dog.

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