the history of pie in mathematics?

Hunter Beech: Many mathematicians find pies tasty. The word you require is presumably pi, a Greek letter used to represnt the concept. You are now better equipped to search for suitable material on the internet. Look for the history of pi.

Sheron Perrez: it isn't any longer somewhat an indication, like a plus sign or a multiplication sign is (something that operates on numbers). ? is a type. it is likewise an alphanumeric character accessible in maximum character contraptions and fonts. certainly, typographers call any character that's no longer regularly interior the character set of maximum fonts a "pi character" indicating that's common of characters you purely want each and every so often for specialized typesetting applications. It replaced into common to the Babylonians and Sumerians. do no longer anticipate from it being a letter of the Greek alphabet that it replaced into the Greeks that first theory approximately it. The call pi and the Greek character ?! have been first given to the assumption interior the 18th Century and purely became oftentimes universal as quickly as Euler started out to apply it. however the assumption has been around for nigh on 4,000 years and emerged independently in diverse cultures, inclusive of China....Show more

Robt Heemstra: 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).The modern symbol for pi [] was first used in our modern sense in 1706 by William Jones, who wrote:There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of pa! rticular Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitat! e the Practice; as for instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 - 4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + ... = 3.14159... = (see A History of Mathematical Notation by Florian Cajori). Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosen as the letter to represent the number 3.141592... because the letter [] in Greek, pronounced like our letter 'p', stands for 'perimeter'. ...Show more