For millennia, mathematicians have been pinning down pi Gazanfer/Getty Images Copyright: Gazanfer/Getty Images
Who was the first person to calculate pi? The first person to realise that, hang on, when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter, you always seem to get the same number, namely slightly more than 3? We will never know exactly, of course, but it is a reasonable assumption that they lived about 4000 years ago.
Let’s start with the ancient Egyptians. A papyrus dated to around 1550 BC, which appears to be a maths textbook of sorts, give examples for…
