The mathematical mistake at the centre of Kate Bush song ‘Pi’

Posted On October 4, 2025October 4, 2025

I don’t know, I just think that if you’re going to make an entire song about maths, you should probably get the maths right, Kate Bush.

Bush dedicating an entire song to a number isn’t all that wild. During her career, the lyrical content of her songs has always sat so far out of the realm of the norms. These are never classic tracks about love or loss, and even when they do deal in those topics, there’s a twist, like singing them from the perspective of a dying snowman, or a murderous widow on a revenge mission.

They get wilder than that. Bush has tracks about everything from religion to doing laundry to being shipwrecked and nearly dying. There are songs about historic genocides and figures, about pop culture icons and literary greats. There are songs about ghosts and killers and mothers and more.

All of that is to say that absolutely nothing is too niche or too left-field for her. There is no topic too random to be out of bounds for her, so the decision to write an entire track simply about pi isn’t all that weird.

In case you didn’t pay attention in maths class, pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, nor does it actually really mean anything to anyone’s day-to-day life, so the need-to-know information is simply that it is a long number with an infinite amount of digits.

In her track, ‘Pi’, Bush rounds it up to around 200 or so, though, for the sake of the song. In place of a chorus, she merely reels off the numbers, singing, “3.14159 26535897932 3846 264 338 3279…” The song isn’t just a flex of her mathematical recall, though. To her, it’s a love song. 

“He does love his numbers,” she sings as she imagines the lover of Archimedes, who discovered the phenomenon. Mostly, it’s about watching someone you love obsess over something and achieve something. It’s oddly endearing for a song filled with more numbers than words.

Maybe that true meaning is the reason why she allowed a slip-up through the cracks. Eagled-eyed and nerdy fans noticed that while for the most part Bush’s maths is correct, she does in fact mess up. 

She messes up on the 54th decimal, which I think can be forgiven given how much of a feat it is to remember that far. But then later, she skips forward a whole 22 decimals, seemingly fast forwarding to a part of the number that simply fit the song better. 

Messing with maths all for the sake of a good rhyme, Bush’s song might be devoted to pi, but it’s not accurate to it, so maybe don’t look towards the singer and this song for any kind of study guide for a maths exam.

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