Pi Approximation Day
Posted by Remis Mureika on
Pi Or Pie, Whether You’re A Fan Of Baking Or Math, Today Is Your Day — Pi Approximation Day On July 22 Glorifies The Concept Of Pi, Which Is Denoted By The Greek Letter Pi And Approximates To 3.14, In The Most Mathematically-Aesthetical Way. To Further Make Pun Jokes Out Of Pi Day, Many Bake Pies On The Holiday. It’s A Great Occasion To Appreciate The Math Concept Used So Regularly In Many Calculations, And Eat Some Delicious Pie!
History Of Pi Approximation Day
Pi Has Been Around For Nearly 4000 Years In Some Form Or Another. Ancient Babylonians Used It — Approximated To 3.125, To Calculate The Dimensions Of Circles. It Was Around 250 B.C. That Pi Was First Calculated By Arguably The Greatest Ancient Mathematician, Archimedes Of Syracuse. He Discovered That Pi Fell Somewhere Between 3 1/7 And 3 10/71. Pi Is Occasionally Referred To As The ‘Archimedes’ Constant.’
Later, In The Mid-400S, Another Great Mathematician, Zu Chongzhi, Computed Pi Again With Lengthy Calculations. Since Archimedes’ Books Were Lost, And Not In China At That Time, Zu Calculated Pi Himself In A New Way. Between Zu And Archimedes, These Two Scientists Were The First To Know Pi In Any True Sense.
Later, Mathematicians Attempted To Better Approximate Pi Using Circumscribed And Inscribed Polygons. This Was How Archimedes First Solved For Pi, And It Remained The Most Common Algorithm For Pi Computation For 1,000 Years. The Most Correct Approximation Achieved Using This Method Came In 1630, With Austrian Astronomer Christoph Grienberger, Who Arrived At 38 Correct Digits Of Pi.
With The Development Of The Infinite Series (The Sum Of The Terms Of An Infinite Sequence) In The 16Th- And 17Th Centuries, The Way Pi Was Calculated Was Reorganized. In India, They Discovered It Early, Between 1400 And 1500 A.D., Yet It’s European Mathematicians Like Leibniz And Gregory Who Popularized It A Century Later. Though Pi Was A Well-known Concept For Centuries, It Wasn’t Until 1706 That The Greek Symbol Pi Came To Represent It. This Was Suggested By William Jones, A Welsh Mathematician, But Not Popularized Until It Was Used By Leonhard Euler In 1737.
In Modern Times, Endless Amounts Of Computing Power Have Been Dedicated To Measuring The Infinite, Irrational Number To The Fullest Extent Possible. The First Time Pi Was Computed By A Machine Was In 1957, When George Reitwiesner And John Von Neumann Used An Eniac Computer To Computate 2,037 Digits Of Pi. Many Intrepid Mathematicians Followed. By 1973, A Million Digits Were Reached With This Method.
The Calculation Of Pi Became A Useful Stress Test For A Computer’s Abilities — Almost Like A Test Run For The Brain. Mathematicians Also Hoped To Have More Accurate Calculations For Pi For Cosmology, Though, For Most Pursuits, Few Digits Are Needed. Emma Haruka Iwao, A Google Employee Who Calculated More Digits Of Pi Than Anyone Else To This Point — 31 Trillion, Has Earned A Rightful Place In The Guinness Book Of World Records.
