Eli5: I always thought pi is 22/7, but recently i found out that 22/7 is a number that is pretty close to pi, not pi itself. Then how do mathematicians found more “pi” ?

Question

Eli5: I always thought pi is 22/7, but recently i found out that 22/7 is a number that is pretty close to pi, not pi itself. Then how do mathematicians found more “pi” ?

In: 167

Answer 1

I have once wrote a program to calculate pi.

You get tons of random points from (0-1)x(0-1) range. They form a square. You calculate how many of these points are inside circle of center 0,5×0,5 and radius 0,5.

Total points quantity divided by quantity of points inside circle will be an approximation of square area divided by circle area. From this data, we can calculate pi. After enough iterations, we can get pretty nice precision.