Jill

May 11, 2011

Jill was my lab partner in 9th grade Earth Science class. She was pretty and had long blond hair with bangs and a large hard purse and she programmed computers too.

At the time I was trying to calculate π using what I now know is the Leibniz formula, and was explaining to her that it was converging very slowly, and she said that her program for calculating π ran forever because π is irrational. She also was writing programs to calculate π!

But I didn’t quite see how π‘s irrationality would affect the program running forever, and she had a hard time explaining, so eventually she got impatient, grabbed a piece of paper, and started writing code. She could write code from memory! This is what she handed me:

10 INPUT "What is the circumference? "; c
20 INPUT "What is the diameter? "; d
30 PRINT c/d

And that’s the first time a girl broke my heart.