Ok, pi is probably a bit over the head of your average 5 year old. I know the definition of pi is circumference / diameter, but is that really how we get all the digits of pi? We just get a circle, measure it and calculate? Or is there some other formula or something that we use to calculate the however many known digits of pi there are?
In: 716
If you take the diameter of a circle and try to wrap it around the circumference, it will take a little bit more than 3 times to wrap around. That’s how we got started on the mess since people wanted to know how much more than 3.
Of course, for most practical stuff they only needed to know it worked out to ~25/8
The way we got the billion whatever digits is a number of experiments in math, done over the world independently (most famously by Archimedes, but also by a number of other Greek, Chinese, Indian, and other big empires in the world at the time) where they figured out the perimeter of a Hexagon, then a 12 sided figure, then a 24, then a 48, then a 96 sided figure, and he stopped there.
In China a few hundred years later they applied the same idea but on a way bigger scale because they had better understandings of algorithms and calculated out to a 12,288 sided figure and got that pi was between 3.1425926 and 3.1415927 and that was the highest that we had for centuries.
In Persia they used 3×2^28 sides those centuries later, and really it just goes like that until we had computers do it for us
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