Facts About Pi

The record for calculating pi, as of 2010, is to 5 trillion digits.

If you were to print 1 billion decimal values of pi in ordinary font it would stretch from New York City to Kansas.

3.14 backwards looks like PIE. Look through the back of the paper!

The first million decimal places of pi consist of 99,959 zeros, 99,758 ones, 100,026 twos, 100,229 threes, 100,230 fours, 100,359 fives, 99,548 sixes, 99,800 sevens, 99,985 eights and 100,106 nines. It cannot be proven, but it is pretty definite that the digits of pi are random.

Pi's evolution

Around 2000 B.C., Babylonians established the constant circle ratio as 3 1/8 or 3.125.

The ancient Egyptians arrived at a slightly different value of 3 1/7 or 3.143.

One of the earliest known records of pi was written by an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes (c. 1650 B.C.) on what is now known as the Rhind Papyrus. He was off by less than 1% of the modern approximation of pi (3.141592).

Plato (427-348 B.C.) supposedly obtained for his day a fairly accurate value for pi: √2 + √3 = 3.146.

The father of calculus (meaning "pebble used in counting," from calx or "limestone"), Isaac Newton, calculated pi to at least 16 decimal places.

William Jones (1675-1749) introduced the symbol "π" in the 1706, and it was later popularized by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) in 1737.