Every parent remembers the first time they tried to teach their child how to count, it sure wasn’t easy was it? Now, can you imagine going through that same process, but with a furry four-legged companion? That’s exactly what Elisabeth Mann Borgese did with her dog Arli.

In October 1962, Elisabeth began what would become a three-year experiment to teach Arli math. She started by using plastic cups, covered by plastic saucers. Each saucer had a number of dots on it, representing a number. Like all patient parents, she started slow–with two saucers signifying counting to two. Arli’s job was to decide which symbol was correct, and then to knock that saucer off the cup. If he was correct, he would find a little bit of food in the cup as a reward. After all, everyone, dog or child, needs a bit of encouragement and positive reinforcement.

After three rigorous months of training filled with what Elisabeth describes as “thousands of errors, disappointments and setbacks,” Arli had finally learned to count to three. Within one more month, he could count to six. Arli would also eventually learn to spell out each of the numbers he was counting, as well as 100+ more words and be able to type them all out on a typewriter. Seriously. But that’s another story for another day. For now, just remember Arli the math dog next time you’re frustrated with your child’s math progress and remember to stay positive, be encouraging, and keep at it!

As a result of Elisabeth’s pioneering research, the field of human-dog communications has flourished. Here’s an amazing clip of one of Arli’s successors, Maggie. Be sure to check out this dog genius, I guarantee you’ll be amazed.

What is pi? Only the most famous, iconic and perfectly chaotic number in the world, that’s what.

Yet if we’re going to get more technical about it, pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter; it’s a mathematical constant and an irrational number. What that means is that it’s an incredibly interesting number that cannot be expressed as an average fraction – like the ones we normally have to work with. When pi is expressed as a decimal, it doesn’t stop at 3.14 because the decimals go on-and-on, literally continuing for millions and trillions of spaces.

What’s even more interesting is that the numbers never repeat. Take the number 3.33333… the pattern stays the same although the decimals continue to infinity, however, pi is so devoid of any pattern that if its digits are taken as random numbers, they may be the most random numbers that we currently know of. Pi is also one of the first numbers to get its own symbol, somewhere around the mid-18th century.

While the Babylonians were the first to estimate the value of pi to be 3, it was Archimedes of Syracuse, a brilliant Greek mathematician, who realized that the value of pi had to be greater than 3 but less than 4 – and he was right. About 1,000 years later, the invention and rise of calculus rekindled the publics interest in getting to the bottom of just how many digits really are incorporated in pi anyway. It turned out that there were lots.

Now let’s fast forward to the 1970’s-1980’s, the interest in the decimals of pi became an obsession thanks to the invention of computers. Two of the world leading tech nations – Japan and the U.S. – were locked in a race to create the super computer. While no one really cared about the trillionth digit of pi, the nation that got the answer had the better computer – hence we now actually know what that digit is.

So what is pi? It is the elite celebrity of numbers, the simplest possible ratio of the simplest possible shape, and a perfectly chaotic world of never ending decimals devoid of order or patterns. Intrigued yet?