Overview

Mankind has been fascinated with π for millennia and attempts to calculate it exactly have taken place for nearly as long as mathematics has existed. In the eighteenth century, rapid advances in mathematics led to a deeper understanding of numbers in general and of π in specific. This enhanced understanding captured the public's attention, discouraged those trying to solve the ancient problem of "squaring the circle," and helped to advance mathematics enormously.

Background

Earlier than 2000 B.C. Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians realized that the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference (which is what π is) was unchanging, regardless of the circle's size. They also quickly realized that this number fell somewhere between the values of 3 1/7 and 3 1/8, values that were to crop up repeatedly for the next three millennia.

One of the first formal mathematical attempts to calculate a...