What is pi?? Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter.
C/ D = π
And today,14th of March is the pi day!! Coincidentally, it is also Albert Einstein's birthday today. Also, it is the death anniversary of Stephen Hawking. Some scientists believe that some famous scientists had a cosmic connection with pi.
Pi is ancient. The Babylonian and the Egyptian civilizations that were the earliest had calculated pi. The Babylonian estimate of 3.125 was closer to 3.14159 than the Egyptian estimate that was 3.16.
Mathematicians then started calculating the value of pi using various methods.
Archimedes was the first to develop this method. First, he took a circle and drew a square both outside and inside the circle. Then, Archimedes made sure that the corners of the internal square were touching the circle and the sides of the external square were touching the circle as shown below. Then, he calculated the perimeter of both the polygons and divided them separately by the length of the diameter. And Archimedes said that a number between these two numbers is pi. But there were so many numbers that could be pi. So, he did this till he arrived at a 96-sided polygon. After his death, many mathematicians continued this, and a mathematician even used up to 35 thousand sides.
Mathematicians are still trying to find out more digits of pi, and with the help of computers, we know about 22 trillion digits of pi. There are people out there who try to memorize the decimals of π and recite them blindfolded.
In 2015, a student from VIT University, Vellore, India recited 70,000 digits of pi in 10 hours.
Very interesting