3/19/2023 0 Comments First person to calculate pi“A value of \(\pi\) to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton,” a group of researchers wrote in a useful history of the number. Heck, Isaac Newton knew that many digits 350 years ago. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses only 15 digits of pi for its highest-accuracy calculations for interplanetary navigation. \begin\) and the golden ratio.īut maybe 31 trillion digits is just a bit of overkill. Using the new technique of integration, mathematicians like Gottfried Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus, could prove such elegant equations for pi as: Meaningful improvement on Archimedes’s method wouldn’t come for hundreds of years. The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. The Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by a formula that gave the approximate value of 3.1605 for pi. Measuring polygons was easier than measuring circles, and Archimedes measured pi-like ratios as the number of the polygons’ sides increased, until they closely resembled circles. Who was the first person to calculate pi A Brief History of. Archimedes approached his calculation of pi geometrically, by sandwiching a circle between two straight-edged regular polygons. A millennium or so later, an estimate of pi showed up in the bible: The Old Testament, in 1 Kings, seems to imply that pi equals 3: “And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about … and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.”Īrchimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, got as far as 3.141 by around 250 B.C. The ancient Egyptians, according to a document that also happens to be the world’s oldest collection of math puzzles, knew that pi was something like 3.1. People have been interested in the number for basically as long we’ve understood math. That’s because it’s an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be represented by a fraction of two whole numbers (although approximations such as 22/7 can come close).īut that hasn’t stopped humanity from furiously chipping away at pi’s unending mountain of digits. While treating pi as equal to 3.14 is often good enough, the number really continues on forever, a seemingly random series of digits ambling infinitely outward and obeying no discernible pattern - 3.14159265358979…. (Hence Pi Day, which takes place on March 14, aka 3/14.)īut the simplicity of its definition belies pi’s status as the most fascinating, and most studied, number in the history of the world. It lurks in every circle, and equals approximately 3.14. But that long history is nothing compared to the infinity of pi itself.Ī refresher for those of you who have forgotten your seventh-grade math lessons 1: Pi, or the Greek letter \(\pi\), is a mathematical constant equal to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter - C/d. Depending on your philosophical views on time and calendars and so on, today is something like the 4.5 billionth Pi Day that Earth has witnessed.
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