Why I don’t like pie

This morning, as I was fumbling with the three digit number lock for my bike and as I later read some tweets about Valentine cancelling itself out this year (14-2-12=0), I was reminded how much numbers matter in our lives.

For me, however, this has always been the source of much frustration. Indeed, if it had been invented back then, I’m sure I would have been diagnosed as a child with at least a mild form of dyscalculia. I remember having to sit through hours and hours of extra math lessons just to be able to do basic sums and even today I struggle. Honestly, I cannot do something like 15+7 immediately. I have to split it up in 15+5 and 20+2. I’m also notoriously bad at mixing up stuff like 97 and 79, thanks partly to the confusing Dutch system of saying zevenennegentig and negenenzeventig. (Even as I wrote this down I noticed that I had confused them).

Later on my dyscalculia developed into a very apathetic relationship to numbers in general. For instance, for someone who likes history it didn’t help, I’m profoundly uninterested in dates. I always needed a little trick just to remember them, like 1798 for the French Revolution. But the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) or the one at Actium (31 BC), two of the most iconic dates of Ancient History – a subject I took at university –, will be forgotten almost as I’m writing this down.

The trouble is numbers don’t mean anything to me. Which is a pain in the ass. I mean, there are phone numbers to remember, credit card codes, locks, birthdays, licence plates (I think mine ends in 927 but honestly, I’m not sure), and so forth. So every so often I get into trouble. Like that morning this summer when I woke up, turned on my cell phone and realised I had suddenly forgotten my PIN code. So I tried once, I tried twice and I tried three times… And then you need a PUK code, in the middle of France, in a hotel, at 6 o’clock in the morning. At which point you yell something that rhymes with PUK…

It has always puzzled me why I am so bad with numbers. The only explanation I can think of is that there are too few numbers. Indeed, there’s only 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and all the rest are combinations of those signs (I have no place in my life for i, e, or π). At least with things and feelings and places and people there are loads of words! And I’ve never had any trouble remember those.

But with numbers, it’s all the same to me. When I use words there is a certain darkness to black and a certain brightness to white (try it, don’t you agree?), but there’s no Constantinopleness to 1453 (The Fall of Constantinople, in my world also dated 1345 or 1354) and 3,14 has nothing to do with pie for me.

Which reminds me. When I was thirteen, I went to a summer camp in Switzerland where one of the guides was an engineer. He was fascinated with numbers and one day even boasted: ‘I can recite π up to 100 digits after the 3!’. At which point a friend of mine, nowadays a paratrooper and in the army’s special forces, replied: ‘So?’.

Quite.