03.14
Allright. Today is March 14th or 3/14, meaning that it’s national Pi day.
So, rather than ask how many digits *do* people know, let’s ask how many digits people *did* know.
The Bible lists the value as three.
In 480, Chung-Chih calulated the value to six digits.
In 1610, Ludolph Van Cuelen worked out an estimation to 34 places.
In 1706, John Machin calculated 100 decimal digits of pi.
In 1807, William Shanks cranked out 707 digits of pi, though only the first 527 were correct.
In 1944, the actual 528th decimal place was discovered.
In 1947, the total was raised to 808.
Today, in the era of supercomputers, we’re able to compute the value of pi out to hundreds of millions of digits.
So how can you remember all those digits? With a simple song, of course!
Here we go!
That’s it for your Pi Day Nemonic and that’s that for BarretTime.
