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How Pi Almost Wasn't
Since you’re reading this essay, you probably already know about the mathematical holiday called Pi Day held on March 14th of each year in honor of the mystical quantity π = 3.14…. Pi isn’t j…
One such mathematician was Ludolph van Ceulen, who spent decades applying Archimedes’ method to analyze polygons with enormous numbers of sides, obtaining before his death 35 decimal digits of pi. One such is K. W. Regan, who, responding to Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s blog post on reasons why 6.28… is better than 3.14…, wrote: “I am agreed that the ‘true’ value of ‘pi’ is off by a factor of 2 – but in the opposite direction!” I sympathize with fans of 1.57…. The difference in point of view is subtle, and can be hard for modern readers to understand since it requires unlearning familiar ways of thinking about numbers and measurement that are drilled into us from an early age.
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