Pi Number
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Pi Number
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 Babylonians
and Egyptians found pi by means of mathematical equations. In the Egyptian Rhind
Papyrus, which is dated around 1650 BC, there is strong evidence supporting that
the Egyptians used 4(8/9)2 =3.16 for their value of pi. At that point in
history, and for the majority of modern history, pi was not seen as an
irrational number as it is today. The next culture that investigated pi was the
ancient Greeks. Starting in 434 BC Greeks were unraveling the mysteries of pi.
The mathematician Anaxagoras made an unsuccessful attempt at finding pi, which
he called squaring the circle and in 414 BC, 20 years after Anaxagoras failed in
his attempt to square the circle, Aristophanes refers to the work of Anaxagoras
in his comedy “The Birds”. It took over 100 years for the Greeks to finally
find a value for pi. In 240 BC Archimedes of Syracuse showed that
223/71*pi*22/7. Archimedes knew, what so many people today do not, that pi does
not equal 22/7 and he made no claim to have discovered the exact value of pi.
However if we take the average of his two bounds we obtain pi=3.1418, which was
an error of about 0.0002. Archimedes found the most accurate value of pi up to
that time and his value would be used exclusively until the next discovery in
t...
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