Since I have access to all the songs in the world I told Rhapsody to just play me some songs that you think I might like.

Rhapsody thought I might like to listen to some Kate Bush which was nice because I haven’t listened to Kate Bush since I was about thirteen with hormones and she was about 19 and hot and she lived in the same town as me – Bexleyheath.

I listened to a few familiar tracks – weird as ever – and then suddenly our Kate seemed to be singing “three point one four one five nine…”. That’s odd I thought and glanced at the title.

Sure enough, the song was called ?.

“I wonder if there is a story behind the song?” I wondered. And googled.

The song is fairly recent and is a tribute to a man who is infatuated with everyone’s favourite transcendental number.

It starts…

“Sweet and gentle and sensitive man
With an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers
And a complete infatuation with the calculation of PI

…and then continues with Kate singing the first 150 digits of pi…but she gets it wrong! She skips a few around 137!

Clearly Kate is much too smart to make a mistake like that and there is bound to be a fascinating explanation…and…the interwebs are full of them.

Some of my favourites:

the best Craftsmen always make one deliberate mistake in anything they create so that the Gods don’t punish them for their arrogance.

The supposed mistakes in pi are all deliberate, and she has actually used them (and lots of other tricks) to embed a secret message in the song. It is our job to decode what that message is.

If that’s what Kate says pi is, then thats good enough for me. I’m hacking my calculator and patching my maths libraries.

And my favourite theory of all:

Kate Bush has been looking all her life for a man who is so geeky that he would notice an error in the Pi song. She’ll be reading your blog and fantasising about you now, you lucky bugger,