PI
The History of Pi A little known verse in the bible reads "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other; it was round all about, and his height was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about(I Kings 7, 23)." This passage from the bible demonstrates the ancient nature of the irrational number pi. Pi in fact is mentioned in a number of verses throughout the bible. In II Chronicles 4,2, in the passage describing the building of the great temple of Solomon which was built around 950BC, pi is given as equal to three. This value is not very accurate at all and should not even be considered accurate for it's time, however it should be noted that precision was not needed for the task that was being performed and we should let the general concept of pi that the biblical characters posses impress us. Present knowledge suggests that the concept of pi first developed in 2000 BC in two separate cultures. The Babylonians used pi at a value of 25/8 while an entirely different culture, the ancient Egyptians used pi at a value of 256/81. While the biblical calculation of pi=3 most likely came from crude measurement, there is strong reason to believe, because of the relative accuracy of the values, that the
Their ENIAC system performed the first electronic computation of pi to 2,037 decimal places. However if we take the average of his two bounds we obtain pi=3. Next to nothing except for this work is known about Tsu Chung-chi'h's life but it is very unlikely that he had any awareness of Archimedes work. In 1958, Genuys found pi to 10,000 decimal places, and in 1962 David Shanks, a relative of the 19th centuary mathematician William Shanks, along with Wrench found pi to 100,000 decimal places. Today you can download files off the internet of values of pi to 2. In 1737, Euler first used the Greek letter pi to represent the mysterious number therefore giving it it's present day name. The next culture that investigated pi was the ancient Greeks. Soon after Lambert's discovery, Legendre showed that pi2 is irrational. In 1945 Ferguson found that the number occupying the 528th place for Shank's value of pi was incorrect. In 240 BC Archimedes of Syracuse showed that 223/71*pi*22/7. Archimedes found the most accurate value of pi up to that time and his value would be used exclusively until the next discovery in the world of pi. The next major finding concerning pi did not occur in the western world, but in China by Tsu Chung-chi'h who approximated pi at 355/113 in 480 AD. The 18th centuary brought about great achievements in the calculating of pi.
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