what is the history of mathematical pie?

Answer 1

The value of Pi has been known for thousands of years, as early as the 19th century BC with Babylonian mathematicians, who were only 0.5% off the true value of pie. Over the centuries, the number became perfected and more accurate my mathematicians of all regions, from China, to Egypt, to India. The German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen computed the first 32 decimal places of pi. In 1947, William Shanks calculated pi to 808 decimal places, only with the help of a mechanical desk calculator.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Hi:

To answer your question you need to know what pi is : It is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter. it a constant number that never changes no matter how big or small the diameter of the circle you make. Start by cut some paper circles of varying diameters say 1 inch , 2 inch and 3 inch take a ruler and mark a spot on the edge of the paper circle and position that spot on the zero mark on the ruler. Then carefully roll the paper circle along the ruler and see where you end up as that point return to the bottom of the circle . This is the circumference now divide that number by the circle diameter, you should get a close value for pi. of about 3.1 or 3.2

Now to answer the second part of your question.
Back about three thousand years ago the ancient Egyptians estimated Pi to be about 3 units (you have to remember that their Mathematics were quite primitive and they had no algebra to help them at this time). Later the ancient Greeks developed and used the area of triangles filling a circle method to estimate pi to be between 22/7 and 3 10/71
around 240 B.C. However this was good enough for building things and such, but is was not good enough for mathematicans however. So a quest was started to find the true value for pi and various methods were used to get a better and better estimate for the value of pi. In about the 15th and 16 th centry A.D. Various discovery where made about Pi:

1) Pi is irrational { Meaning it does not repeat itself ever ; like 1/3} and it's transcendental { Meaning that powers of and combination of powers of pi will not give finite whole numbers } So all formulae for computing pi will be infinitely long.

2) with the devolpment of Algbera and Calculus, certain series were found to give the approximate value of pi

PI= sqr ( 6*(1 + 1/(2^2)+ 1/(3^2)+ 1/ (4^2) + 1/(5^2).....) { sqr means Square root}

or

PI = 4*( 1- (1/3)+(1/5)-(1/7)+(1/9)- (1/11)......)

Those series take a long time to come to the value of Pi that we know Pi to be today. Which bring us to our era, when electronic computers where built, and as soon as they became avialable. Mathematican were able to comfirm those series to be the appoximate value of Pi , which are still in use today. it has been calulated the about 15 billion decimal places and is so well known that it is use to gauged the speed and power of all supercomputers and computers that made today and in the future to come. and it being surpassed in the number of decimal places to be counted in. and it pop up in some interesting places.

Answer 3

Before computers, pi was calculated by 'squaring the circle', i.e. drawing a multi-sided geometric shape within the circle and calculating the area of the shape. This was a tedious procedure.

Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it was a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8 (3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and much harder to work with. For more, see A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset Press).

Answer 4

Mathematical pie is something that mathematicians eat more and more of as the limit of their hunger approaches infinity. -.^

But seriously, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#history for a very detailed history and analysis.