Civilizational Collapse (Part 5)
Azimuth 2025-04-24
Summary:
A tale of civilizational decline and rebirth. Around 250 BC Archimedes found a general algorithm for computing pi to arbitrary accuracy, and used it to prove that 223/71 < π < 22/7. This seems to be when people started using 22/7 as an approximation to pi. By the Middle Ages, math had backslid so much […]