aphar

I came to the USA for the first time on September 11, 1992 as a math grad student at UCLA. Here is what happened at the San-Francisco airport. (Aeroflot did not fly to Los Angeles at that time, so had to take a bus from SF to LA). My English was lousy - I could read, of course, but I had a hard time understanding spoken words - in part because I was taught the British phonetics in the Soviet Union.

The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it was called then) official (a big guy wearing an impressive uniform - probably also adorned with a gun and handcuffs - but that may be my later imagination) looked at my papers and asked:

"You will be a graduate student in math at UCLA, won't you?"

"Yes" - I answered.

"Well, and what is π?"

Here I should notice that here in the United States people pronounce π as pie (in my home country, Russia, they say pee). I did not know that, so I did not understand what he was asking about:

"Pie? Cake?" - I asked.

"No. I'm talking about circles!" - he answered, and it seemed to me that he was not quite happy.

"Round cake? Torte?" - I was still lost.

"No! Pie in the area of circle!" - he said, and this time I wish I were dreaming.

"?!?!"

"Okay! Area is pie are squared!" - he said angrily.

I understood only words area and square, and tried to say something about Squaring the Circle - the ancient problem of erecting with ruler and compass the square of the same area that of the given circle (which is unsolvable since π is not a root of a quadratic equation with integer coefficients). The problem was exaggerated by the fact that at that time I did not know yet the words compass and ruler, and used instead words circle and line, which are very close to the corresponding Russian words.

"No!!!" - he yelled and wrote on a piece of paper

    Area=PI*R²
    PI=3.1

Here I began to understand something and feverishly cried the following digits: "four, one, five, nine, two..."

He was satisfied, he stamped my papers and let me through.

Of course, he did not try to "catch" me, he was just making a conversation, but I was scared to death and was wondering whether he was going to charge me with espionage and not allow to enter the United States...