Pi Day: Why the long history of calculating pi will never be completed

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…