- Frozen Man
- Bullet Journal
- Why It’s So Hard to Go against the Grain?
- The Physics Of Surfing
- Why Do Traffic Signs Look The Way They Do?
- The Shape of Water
- Where did the meteorites go?
- Pi Number
- Why Every City Has Its Own Climate?
- Instant Noodles
- The Coming Renaissance
- Paracelsus: Alchemy to the Aid of Medicine
- History of Coins
- Why do waterfalls retreat?
А Grand Competition
If one were to measure the circumference of a circle with a rope, it would turn out that it’s equal to approximately three times its own diameter — people determined this as far back as ancient times. The amazing thing is that this ratio is true for any circle, no matter what size it may be, from a button to a wheel. In other words, all circumferences can be expressed by a specific constant, which is known to be slightly greater than three. For hundreds of years, it plagued the minds of great thinkers since it clearly was a value of great significance, and they had almost succeeded in calculating it, but the search dragged on for thousands of years.
The Ancient Babylonians defined the value of π as equal to 3. This comes from the formula for the area of a circle S = l²/12 (where l i is the circumference of the circle), which was found in the calculations of the Babylonians. This is a very rough estimate that leaves a lot of room for errors. Of course, they didn’t use the in designation π in Babylon — with this character we refer to the ratio of the circumference to its diameter.
