Pi on T-shirts illegal due to a registered trademark

As a kid, I thought that \(\pi\approx 3.14159265358979\) is a very important number, so I memorized the first 30 digits when I was 8. Because the amount of "wow" I could see at school was higher than the efforts I had to invest to learn the digits, I learned 100 digits when I was 10 – I can still tell you how it goes – even though I was already recognizing very clearly that there's no point in learning too many digits.

The number\[

\Huge \pi^{\rm TM}\approx 3.14

\] is arguably the most important irrational number in mathematics – possible competitors are \(e\) and \(\sqrt{2}\). It is very natural for a high percentage of geeky mugs and T-shirt to display this Greek lowercase letter.

Off-topic, programming: BTW, with some improved score around 3.67, I returned to top 15 (and top 3%) of the Higgs machine learning contest LOL.

Houston, we have a problem. A bizarre T-shirt company Pi Productions led by a Brooklyn street artist Paul Ingrisano has successfully copyrighted \(\pi\)© as the U.S. trademark registration 4,473,631. Congratulations or, even more precisely, fak you, aßhole.




The news about the bizarre legal decision were kickstarted by Wired yesterday; see Google News for others. The Wired article reminds us that this may be the most important legal verdict related to \(\pi\)® since 1897 when Indiana tried to enforce the value \(\pi=3.2\) on its citizens.




A difference between a rabbit hit by a car and a lawyer hit by a car is that you may see some traces of the tires in front of the rabbit from the braking. The world of lawyers has its own rules that often work in order to help the society – and the good guys in the society – but some of the decisions are just stunning.

I can't imagine an acceptable justification of this decision. Jez Kemp rightfully quipped that the verdict is as weird as McDonald's monopoly over the letter "M". The letter \(\pi\)© belongs to the Greeks. This is already a simplification, of course. There's been some pre-history and post-history of the alphabets. A similar letter to the capital Greek \(\Pi\) was adopted in the Cyrillics, too. And so on. The mathematical constant \(\pi\)™ has been discussed by people for 4,000 years or so.

In Central Europe, the number \(\pi\) is a victim of another but less dramatic injustice. We often call it "the Ludolph number" after Ludolph van Ceulen (1540-1610) who managed to calculate 35 digits of \(\pi\)© correctly (during his life which is a long time ago). While it was an impressive achievement at that time, I am not sure whether it really justifies his "ownership" of the constant, either.

But what's special about a particular street artist relatively to everyone else who is fascinated by \(\pi\)® and wants to share his excitement?

A fine for BNP Paribas is just an insanity

One more news report about the unreasonable decisions by arrogant lawyers and politicians caught my attention today. The eurozone's largest bank, BNP Paribas – of course that even folks like myself have funds of order $10,000+ associated with that bank – is being criminalized in the U.S. because it made business with Iran and covered it which is totally OK in France and Europe but it was not OK in America. The supposed fine is $10 billion – it's like one year of profits of the whole corporation. I can't believe my eyes.

America is important but what do these evil people think about themselves? If they had some respect towards the allies, they would agree that they wouldn't even have a right to criticize a company for doing something that is OK according to the laws where the bank is performing most of the operations. OK, imagine that a concept of a fine is acceptable. But this infinite fine? Do the U.S. officials think that they may impose an unlimited fine on any company in the world just because it ignores what they consider "their rules"? Can other nations do it, too? May the Czech Republic order Exxon to pay $1 trillion? Because its CEO doesn't speak Czech which the CEOs should?

This proposed $10 billion fine is completely disproportional relatively to what BNP Paribas has done. Some U.S. politicians have done much more to allow Iran to do dangerous things than BNP Paribas. If a punishment proportional to this $10 billion fine for BNP Paribas were applied to Barack Obama himself, all blacks and Democrat politicians in the U.S. would have to be executed.

So I would like to remind these arrogant jerks that they are not owning the world. Iran is a potentially dangerous country but if this is the cure, then the cure – these U.S. apparatchiks – is worse than the disease.

Blondes' DNA, completely off-topic: I was intrigued by the announcements that the gene of the blondes has been identified. The researchers were inspired by fish, successfully produced blonde mice, and then they succeeded with some human cell cultures, too.