Kate Bush’s “Pi”

Kate Bush’s new album, Aerial, has a song named “Ï€” (pi, if you can’t read that). It’s a very nice song, but she’s wrong about the digits of pi.

The lyrics list 118 digits of pi, but comparing that with the calculated value of pi in Mathematica (which I trust more than Kate Bush), shows that she has a couple of digits wrong, and she left out a chunk of 22 digits.

Arranged for comparison, with Kate Bush as (a) and Mathematica as (b), we have:

This matches
a: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582
b: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582

This is just wrong
a: 31
b: 0

Kate skipped this section
a:
b: 9986280348253421170679

The final section is correct
a: 8214808651328230664709384460955058223
b: 8214808651328230664709384460955058223

It seems really bizarre to me for Kate to write a song about someone obsessed with pi, and then get the digit sequence wrong.

In any case, it’s a great album. Highly Recommended.