an estimate for the value of pi. Archimedes was obsessed with math, often getting lost in his work and forgetting to eat. Legend has it he discovered his principle of buoyancy while taking a bath.

As Saha and Sinha discovered more than 600 years later, Madhava’s formula is only a special case of a much more general equation for calculating pi. In their work, the string theorists ...

This problem was discovered in the 18th century by French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In 1897, Indiana state legislators tried passing a Pi Bill that legally defined pi ...