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The Man Who Invented Pi (2009) (historytoday.com)
40 points by Hooke on March 15, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



If you're interested in the mathematical development of Pi the book A History of Pi is a must read: https://www.amazon.com/History-Pi-Petr-Beckmann/dp/031238185...



> They didn’t call it Pi though.

Which goes against the whole article anyway, since Jones didn't invent, or claim to invent, the concept of Pi either, that'd be a 3-way shootout between ancient indians, chinese or egyptians, Jones just assigned it the name Pi.


It's sad that some Indians leaders and followers ignore these achievement and just try to claim they had hi-tech internet in ancient days .https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/india...


He was the father of the philologist William Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)



Also found by ancient Chinese Zu Chongzhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zu_Chongzhi


If your post is intended to combat the tendency for westerners to constantly repeat stories about western contributions to science and culture and to minimize or ignore the contributions of other cultures then I'd agree but I think your post doesn't really get that across.

The article seems to be making the assertion that William Jones was the first person to use the Greek Letter "Pi" to represent Pi the transcendental number and the first to suggest Pi was unable to be "expressed in numbers."

So in that sense the claim is that Jones invented the association of "Pi" to Pi...the association of the Greek letter to the number itself.

The article really isn't talking about finding approximations for pi so neither Zu Chongzhi nor Archimedes or any other older mathematicians finding approximations are really relevant here. [0]

Frankly its not even a particularly interesting piece of history in my opinion. A curiosity but nothing more.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Antiquity


Fair enough, thanks for the references. My previous comment was merely intended to be anecdotal, not trying to invoke arguments :)


I'm still partial to tau.

https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto


Half of me thinks that too




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