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...
Do you know π?!
No?! You're a spy!!!