pizine

On this page, find the history, mission, and a note about the name of pi.zine!  To contact the editor, Sarah Voss, click here.

History

PiZine began in the early 1990s as a personal perspective electronic magazine dedicated to exploring the relationship between mathematics and religion. At the time, there was a dearth of material which directly explored the math/theology connection. PiZine helped fill this gap. Back then, ezines were almost unheard of, and the vision for this electronic journal did not unfold in exactly the direction that founder Sarah Voss had anticipated. The site gradually became the docking grounds for Sarah’s own work, and the interactive aspect of PiZine never fully emerged. Now, some twenty years later, pi.zine! has had a make-over.

It is still a dissemination arena for sharing information about Sarah’s writings and services. Dr. Voss has been a pioneer in the shaping of two specific areas of thought about the connection between math/science and religion. Her early work with “mathaphors” in MATHEOLOGY (she coined both terms) has led her to be called a “stellar visionary” regarding the many ways in which metaphors drawn from mathematics impact our religious and spiritual perspectives. Matheology provides the theoretical grounding for Sarah’s more recent work; in MORAL MATH she transitions into the arena of experiential application. Sarah’s writings about matheology and moral math have increased in substance and number to the point that a need has developed to make them more collectively accessible. This new version of pi.zine! not only offers this accessibility, but it intentionally develops ways to expand this work and to bring it to the interactive attention of others who might be interested in it. Ultimately, it is only through the collective input of many individuals that the subtleties of the impact of math on religion will be fully fleshed out.

Mission

The first part of the new pi.zine! mission is to provide easy access to the collective works of Sarah.  The pages on Matheology and Moral Math provide specifics about the two main areas of her exploration. For a comprehensive list of her literary accomplishments, see Writings and for some relevant essays see Sarah’s Notebook.

The second part of the new pi.zine! mission is to make available information about Services which Dr. Voss offers: Workshops, Lectures, Sermons, Classes, Weddings, Mediation.

The third part of the new pi.zine! mission is to generate a forum and other vehicles to build wider interest in the connection between mathematics and religion. Two sections in the redesigned site are the initial steps in making this happen: Circle Friends and Exhibit

A Note About the Name

In mathematics, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Its numerical value is approximately 3.1416. This is only an approximate value because pi is an irrational number and, hence, can never be precisely determined. Nonetheless, many individuals throughout history have attempted to do just that. In the early 1600s, for instance, Ludolph van Ceulen of the Netherlands spent so much of his life computing pi to thirty-five decimal places that the number was engraved on his tombstone. Much more recently the Chudnovsky brothers calculated pi (with the help of their supercomputer) to well over two billion digits. If it were printed in ordinary type, this approximation of pi would stretch from the east to the west coast of the United States. Even so, the two brothers were unable to find any predictable pattern to the digits. Occasionally, this illusive nature of pi has frustrated those searching for a precise value. The governing legislature in one state, for instance, once “resolved” the problem by decreeing the value of pi to be exactly three.

The search for an exact value of pi is a little like the search for an exact understanding of God. Some renderings are clearly better than others, but even the best effort seems to fall short of an accurate description. Such a precise understanding simply isn’t feasible in our present space/time- bound world. Mathematicians, however, have developed the tools to explore higher-dimension worlds, and in these hyperspace realms unexpected and sometimes unsettling discoveries are made. Perhaps someday some as yet invisible pattern to pi will emerge in higher dimensional mathematics. If so, maybe we’ll also be one dimension clearer in our understanding of God!