PI-KU

What are Pi-Ku?

“Pi-Ku” is a play on the word “haiku”: my term for the haiku that I—and you readers!—will be using this site to find within the first million digits of Pi.

What is Pi?

Pi is a mathematical constant: the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It's also an irrational number, which means that its digits go on forever without ever arriving at Pi's exact value.

All those digits (or the first million of them, anyway), when converted into letters, are the field from which we'll be harvesting haiku.

What's a haiku?

A haiku is a form of classical Japanese poetry consisting of three short lines.

This is the only rule we'll need on this site, though there are others, if you want to follow them:

• Syllable count: Most people are aware of the 5-7-5 rule, that the first line of a haiku must have five syllables, the second line seven, and the third line five, but actually, most serious haiku being written in English today—even translations of classical 5-7-5 Japanese haiku—don't follow any syllabic patterns at all.
  • This is because Japanese words tend to have more syllables than English words, so fewer of them can be fit into a line of five or seven total syllables. Furthermore, Japanese syllables are simpler and lighter than English syllables (to the point that they are sometimes barely even pronounced in speech), so there not only fewer words in Japanese haiku, but they are also spoken more fleetingly. All this causes English language haiku in 5-7-5 to sound wordy and heavy.
  • I write haiku to various patterns: some in 5-7-5 and many more with no pattern at all, but my favorite form is 3-5-3. It retains the fun of writing to a rule, but it's more challenging and results in haiku that sound more like classical Japanese haiku.
• Season word: Classical Japanese haiku had to include a “season word,” which makes sense considering how close to nature life was lived in medieval Japan when the haiku form was developed. I still write seasonal haiku but I also like writing haiku that explore the modern, urban, technological world I live in.
• Haiku surprise: Classical Japanese haiku almost always featured a turning point somewhere between their first and last lines that made the second half of the haiku a kind of surprise or twist. This is the classical rule I try most to follow.

This site converts the first million digits of Pi into letters, two digits at a time, resulting in half a million letters.

Two digits at a time means that the possible numbers range from 0 (00) to 99. They're converted into letters according to the following table:

For example, the digits “3102364591” would translate to “haiku”

h	a	i	k	u
31	02	36	45	91

To search for a haiku, just start entering words into the three edit fields. As you type, the site will see if it can find all the words you've entered, somewhere in the first million digits (the first half million letters) of Pi.

Be aware, however, that your words have appear in Pi in the order you write them. For example, if you enter “Let's look for haiku!” the search will fail on “haiku” even though “haiku” is in the digits of Pi. This is because the site had to first find a “lets” and then find the first “look” after that “lets” and then find the first “for” after that “look”. And then it couldn't find a “haiku” after that “for”, though there is one before that “for”.

Happy searching!

Helpful Hints

• The longer the word, the less likely it is that it will randomly appear within even a million digits of Pi. So try to construct your haiku from shorter words.
• The longer the sentence, the less likely it is that its words will not only all appear in Pi, but appear in the order you wrote them.
  • Rather than compose an entire haiku and try to find it all at once, start with just a word or two and slowly build your haiku from what can be found.
  • This technique will lead to surprises even for you as the poet, which is one of the delights of any kind of creative writing.
• Make liberal use of the Suggest Words button.

Share the haiku you find (by clicking on the “share” button that will appear below the haiku) to Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, Facebook, or Threads with the hashtag #piku, and I might repost them from the Pi-Ku social feeds, along with haiku I find and post myself.

Follow one or more of the Pi-Ku social feeds to see the haiku we're all finding!

This haiku was found in the first million digits of Pi

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