The young Oxonian, on the contrary, had led out one of his maiden aunts, on whom the rogue played a thousand little knaveries with impunity; he was full of practical jokes, and his delight was to tease his aunts and cousins; yet, like all mad-cap youngsters, he was a universal favourite among the women.
The Clown […] says: ‘And so we wept; and there was the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed’; to which his father, the Shepherd, adds the comfortable antiphon, ‘We may live, son, to shed many more.’
Pi... came to be called the Ludolphian number, after Ludolph van Ceulen, a German mathematician who approximated it to thirty-five decimal places... a calculation that took Ludolph most of his life to accomplish, and gave him such satisfaction that he had the digits engraved on his tombstone... the stone vanished, possibly to be turned into a sidewalk slab. Somewhere in Leiden, people may be walking over Ludolph's digits.
