Why did the first person even ask what it was?
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Pi is useful to know because lots of things are circular. Like, if you have a granary that is cylindrical in shape, and you fill it to a certain depth, about how much grain is that? How many baskets of a known size will it fill? This could be a pretty important question if, for example, you assess taxes in grain. If part of the King’s palace is to be built in a semi-circle, how many evenly-spaced columns are needed to complete the colonnade?
But for these uses you just need an approximation of pi. We know from ancient egyptian and babylonian sources that they basically just said “It’s a bit more than 3” and called it close enough. I honestly think that Archimedes – who we know as the first person to use a method to fairly accurately calculate pi – just wanted to know what Pi was. It’s an interesting riddle, and solving it yields a mathematical constant that really would have seemed like a secret of the universe at that time.
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