Kenneth Ingham Consulting, LLC

About i-pi.com

Why i-pi.com instead of something predictable like ingham.com? The short answer is that Kenneth thought ingham.com was boring. It was available when i-pi.com was registered in the early 1990s.

The intended name was iπ: an italic i followed by the Greek letter pi. Domain names cannot contain italics or Greek letters, however—and at the time, even displaying π on a web page depended on having a sufficiently new browser.

The next choice was i*pi, but an asterisk is not legal in a domain name. ipi looked too easy to mispronounce and misunderstand.

Kenneth therefore requested i_pi.com on the registration paperwork. An underscore is not legal in a hostname either, so the registration confirmation came back with the legal approximation: i-pi.com.

That still leaves the more interesting question: why iπ?

The Church of the real Holy Value

This is a mathematical joke from Kenneth's undergraduate years at the University of New Mexico. It is humor—not an actual religious organization, religious practice, or statement of belief.

The real Holy Value is not one—and it is not 1 either—to be taken lightly. It is a foundation upon which many great things are built.

The real Holy Value is not an integer. Integers are plain, and nothing truly holy is plain. There is beauty in the real Holy Value. Its derivatives occur often in nature, and humans use them daily throughout the civilized world (though that raises the separate question of how one defines “civilized”).

It is:

Otherwise known as:

It could also be the negative of that value. That leads in another direction—a place we do not wish to visit right now.

Note that the derivative with respect to i—with “derivative” defined loosely—is π. Pi is one of the fundamental constants of nature, occurring throughout the expanding sphere of our universe. It gives the church its unmoving support: a base from which we grow. Pi goes on forever without repeating itself, always unique, like the minds of those enlightened by the real Holy Value. Pi is not a rational number, much like those enlightened ones who know of the real Holy Value.

The derivative with respect to π is i, the square root of negative one: an imaginary number. Without imagination, we are nothing. This part of the real Holy Value gives its followers the potential for growth and expansion, for with imagination, anything is possible.