Tracing the Evolution of Pi from Archimedes to Modern Computers
Via Brewminate
The Story
The quest to calculate pi stretches back nearly 4,000 years, beginning with early approximations in Babylon around 3.125 and ancient Egypt near 3.1605 that both landed close to but short of the true value.
Around 250 BCE the Greek mathematician Archimedes introduced the first rigorous geometric method, drawing polygons inside and outside a circle to bound pi and pin it to the digits 3.14.
Ptolemy later refined the same polygon technique to reach 3.1416, while the Chinese mathematician Liu Hui achieved four accurate digits and Zu Chongzhi pushed to seven, a record that held for roughly 800 years.
The rise of infinite series mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries accelerated everything, with Isaac Newton computing 15 digits in 1665 and later scholars reaching 71, 100, and eventually 620 digits by hand.
Electronic computers transformed the pursuit entirely, as ENIAC calculated 2,037 digits in roughly 70 hours during the late 1940s and modern machines have since found trillions of digits.
Each new record reflects less a practical need for more decimals than a benchmark of mathematical ingenuity and raw computing power, with pi calculation now serving as a standard stress test for new hardware.
Around 250 BCE the Greek mathematician Archimedes introduced the first rigorous geometric method, drawing polygons inside and outside a circle to bound pi and pin it to the digits 3.14.
Ptolemy later refined the same polygon technique to reach 3.1416, while the Chinese mathematician Liu Hui achieved four accurate digits and Zu Chongzhi pushed to seven, a record that held for roughly 800 years.
The rise of infinite series mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries accelerated everything, with Isaac Newton computing 15 digits in 1665 and later scholars reaching 71, 100, and eventually 620 digits by hand.
Electronic computers transformed the pursuit entirely, as ENIAC calculated 2,037 digits in roughly 70 hours during the late 1940s and modern machines have since found trillions of digits.
Each new record reflects less a practical need for more decimals than a benchmark of mathematical ingenuity and raw computing power, with pi calculation now serving as a standard stress test for new hardware.
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