Some folks celebrate today as National Pi Day, others insist it is 22/7 or July 22.
Either way, it is good to remember just how much that symbol has intrigued mankind everywhere and through the ages - and how our computational skills have evolved
Courtesy of Wikipedia here are some key milestones:
1900 BC Babylonia: 25/8 and Egypt: 256/81
200 BC Archimedes: 223/71 < π < 22/7
480 Zu Chongzhi (China) 3.1415926 < π < 3.1415927
around 1400, Madhava (Kera
la, India) got it to 11 decimals
1424 Jamshid al-Kashi (Persia) got it to 16 decimals
around 1600 Ludolph van Ceulen (Germany) got it to 32 decimals
1706 John Machin (England) got it to 100 decimals
1949 John Von Neuman (US) calculated 2037 decimals, a calculation that took 70 hours on the ENIAC
1973 Jean Guilloud and M. Bouyer (France) calculate over million digits taking 23.3 hours on a CDC 7600
1989 The Chudnosky brothers (US) manage over 1 billion digits
2002 Yasumasa Kanada (Japan) gets to 1.2 trillion digits using 600 hours on a Hitachi SR8000/MPP
You can buy the poster shown in image from this site. In the foreground are the first 50 digits of pi and in a smaller font in the background are nearly 75.000 digits.
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