Felix Kaufmann’s three-stanza song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with a linked musical score, turns the Mises circle’s attachment to its center into a playful geometrical lament. Its governing conceit makes intellectual fellowship a spatial relationship: the center’s departure leaves the circumference emotionally and structurally bereft.
When its center starts to saunter, Its circumference feels empty, disheartened, and low.
The first stanza establishes separation; the second transfers grief to π, giving mathematical abstraction a comic emotional life. Numerical precision becomes a measure of suffering:
Many of my estimations Are consumed by lamentations, I am mortally wounded to the thousandth place, it’s true.
The rhyme of “estimations” and “lamentations” joins calculation to sorrow, while the thousandth-place wound exaggerates the circle’s dependence on its absent center. The closing stanza shifts from mourning to an appeal for restored fellowship:
Old familiar place assuming, We are bent on presuming our hopes aren’t in vain.
Anticipated jubilation answers the opening emptiness. The song’s significance lies in this affectionate self-portrait of an intellectual circle: shared mathematical language supplies both the joke and the means of expressing collective vulnerability.
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