Every year on March 14th, the world celebrates one of the most important mathematical constants,

Pie.

It's a number which appears all over nature, even in places you wouldn't expect it.

It's also a number that's been known, or at least has been approximated by civilizations for thousands of years.

Today, there's still more we're discovering about this number with the help of supercomputers.

Learn more about Pie and how our knowledge of it has advanced over time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. We might as well start the discussion of pie with its definition.

Pie is not We might as well start the discussion of pie with its definition.

Pie is nothing more than the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

On one hand, it's extremely simple, but at the same time it's devilishly complicated.

The problem is that the circumference of a circle isn't divided evenly by its diameter.

Finding out exactly what this ratio was has been the subject of inquiry for centuries.

Almost every civilization knew about the importance of this ratio.

How they differed is in how they approximated the number and the methods they used to figure it out.

A Babylonian tablet that dates back to about 1700 BC has an approximation of pie of 3.125.

Earlier Babylonian approximations just use the number 3.

An Egyptian text known as the Rin Papyrus has a value that works out to 3.105.

Some people who have analyzed the Great Pyramid have determined that the Egyptians used the ratio of

22 to 7 as an approximation for Pie. Ancient Indian mathematicians wrote in the

Shahatapatha Brahmana that Pie was approximately 339 over 108, which works out to 3.139.

The techniques used to find these approximations in the ancient world were primarily geometric and physical.

They would use either a compass and a straight edge or physically create a circle and measure it.

Believe it or not, these ancient measurements weren't that bad.

...