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.

For some additional π day fun, download piX for Mac OSX. I calculated it out to one million decimals, which took 447.190 seconds. When I tried to post it, my database choked. So below is π to much less than one million decimals. Enjoy!

π=3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798

21480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811

17450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810

97566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692

3460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606

31558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001133

053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195

309218611738193261179310511854807446237996274956735188

57527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213

949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523

846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577

896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922

796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747

713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963

18595024459455346908302642522308253344685035261931188

171010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303598

253490428755468731159562863882353787593751957781857780

532171226806613001927876611195909216420198938095257201

0654858632788659361533818279682303019520353018529689

9577362259941389124972177528347913151557485724245415069

59508295331168617278558890750983817546374649393192550

6040092770167113900984882401285836160356370766010471

01819429555961989467678374494482553797747268471040475

3464620804668425906949129331367702898915210475216205

6966024058038150193511253382430035587640247496473263

91419927260426992279678235478163600934172164121992458

6315030286182974555706749838505494588586926995690927

You can take it however you want. I think I would be flattered. Some people, I can imagine, would be violently offended. You use this, or variations, e.g. “What they say about you…”, cut me a check.