World Pi Day: 3/14 — The Ongoing Mystery of Pi

By Raymond Van Dyke
March 14, 2018

Today is National and World Pi Day because the numbers of the day (3-14) match the first three digits for pi or , the Greek letter, 3.1415926535897…  Although most people think that  is relegated to just geometry and trigonometry, the number pervades all of mathematics and the natural sciences, even statistics.

Several thousand years ago the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chinese and the Ancient Greeks tried to make sense of the world through mathematics, an abstract way to envision and explain the operations of Nature, not as the activities of the gods.  Over time geometry developed, which could explain much of the world.  For example, Euclid and his various axioms were employed to describe much of the natural world.  However, when it came to circles and non-linear lines, there remained a mystery among all the Ancients, which was.

It had long been recognized (and still taught to reluctant students in high school geometry) that the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter is a constant.  The Ancients knew this, but the value of that constant eluded them.  They realized, however, that there were approximations, e.g., the fractions 25/8, 22/7, 256/81, etc., that were close, and these fractions were employed for centuries as substitute for pi.

Over two thousand years ago Archimedes carried this approximation technique to its logical limit, using techniques akin to calculus infinities approaches, and was able to obtain very close estimates of  to whatever tolerance was needed, e.g., through circumscribing and inscribing large numbers of polygons, e.g., an algorithm employing up to 96 such polygons for an accuracy between 3.1408 and 3.14285, about 99.9% accuracy.  But, around the year 480 A.D., Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi used this approach with 12,288 polygons, created a far more accurate fractional approximation, 355/113, roughly 99.99999% accurate, which was the best approximation for  for the next 800 years.

As a side note, through recent discoveries, Archimedes is also credited with understanding aspects of calculus long before Newton and Leibnitz, who developed differential and integral calculus just over three hundred years ago.  Had the Roman soldier not killed Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse, our world may have been very different.  But, I digress.

Clearly, these fractional representations of  were all approximations and not a pure answer, which galled the Ancients at their inability to solve the conundrum.  Indeed, the purity in mathematics was at the heart of Euclidian geometry’s goals of solving problems.  For example, in their effort to solve the  enigma, the Greeks were famous in their efforts to “square the circle,” i.e., geometrically constructing a square having the same area as a given circle, and asking whether Euclid’s axioms posit the existence of such a number.  However, the Greeks and many others later could not do it, which had profound implications to Plato regarding the usefulness of Euclid’s theorems or even mathematics to actually describe the real world.  In short, the quest was impossible.

With Euclid and the pre-Socratics trying to explain the world in physical ways, e.g., Democritus postulating atoms in a very logical way 2,500 years ago, it is sad that the mystery of  seems to have derailed the very influential thinkers Socrates and Plato to fully trust mathematics.  Accordingly, Plato looked to another realm to describe the world: using his forms or abstractions.  For example, the concepts of a circle and  were perfect, idealized forms, but every attempt to depict them in the real world would, by definition, be imperfect.  This philosophical view held sway until the Renaissance started new ways of thinking.

But, back to.  We now know that pi is both Irrational and Transcendental.  An irrational number is defined as a number that is not a ratio of two whole numbers, i.e., fractions. This irrationality of pi is strongly suggested by Archimedes’ and others’ succession of better and better fractional approximations, without a final answer.  Also, with computerization it has been found that the digits of pi have no pattern, and for several trillion digits pass the mathematical test of normality, i.e., all of the digits appear equally often in the series.  The irrational nature of pi was formally proven in 1761.

A transcendent number is defined as a number that is not the root of any non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients, which is a modern way of saying you cannot square the circle.   The transcendence of  was proven in 1882.  The staggering notion that the digits go on and on, without repeating or in any pattern to infinity, was (and remains) hard to grasp, the immensity of which was something well understood to Aristotle and others.  Over a hundred years ago, however, mathematician George Cantor tackled the mathematical problem of infinity and actually demonstrated the nuances between infinities.  is also computed by various techniques, e.g., equations and trigonometric series, that have terms that go to infinity.

The use of the Greek letter  in this context dates from about three hundred years ago when the great mathematician Leonhard Euler started popularizing it.  Mathematician William Jones in 1706 is accredited with being the first to symbolize the circle circumference-to-diameter ratio as, which is also attributed to the Greek word for perimeter.  Prior to computers, pi calculation was a laborious and very error-prone endeavor.  With the advent of computing, the mere six or seven hundred digit manual calculations not too many decades ago have jumped to many trillions of digits.

Despite all of the mathematical rigor of the modern era,  remains a mystery, a constant that in a way is inconstant.  Of course, there are many other such enigmatic irrational and transcendent numbers out there, e.g., e (2.71828182845…), but  is the oldest of these cosmic constants for us humans.  On a related note, this is the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, an inscrutable movie that still contains innumerable mysteries.  It is also the 20th anniversary of, the movie, a psychological thriller about the irrationality of and the human mind.  In Star Trek, Mr. Spock crashed a hostile computer making it calculate pi precisely.  also pops up once and a while in TV shows, such as the Simpsons.

This magical number is everywhere, and is part of our lives – even if you hated high school geometry and math.  Indeed, we are all still trying to understand the meanings of.

The Author

Raymond Van Dyke

Raymond Van Dyke has been an intellectual and technology attorney and consultant for over 25 years, specializing in IP procurement, prosecution, IP portfolio building and management, licensing, legislative advocacy and expert witnessing. He is licensed to practice law in Washington, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and the Patent & Trademark Office of the United States. He is also admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Appeals for the Federal, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Circuits, as well as the Federal Court of Claims and the Court of International Trade. For more information or to contact see his profile at Van Dyke Law.

The views expressed in the article are his own and not those of his clients or organizations.


Discuss this

There are currently 6 Comments comments.

  1. Benny March 15, 2018 5:21 am

    pi day also happens to be Albert Einsteins’ birthday.

  2. anonymous March 15, 2018 9:05 am

    Question re: Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi’s work: 355/13 is 27.30769230769231, which is nowhere near the value of pi. This seems to be a typo carried through from many other online articles. Perhaps these articles meant to write 355/113, which is 3.141592920353982, and much closer to pi.

  3. Raymond Van Dyke March 15, 2018 3:05 pm

    And now Stephen Hawkins’ death day. Thanks for your comment.


  4. Raymond Van Dyke March 16, 2018 11:03 am

    Some have noted a typo in the paper! Alas, like in the error-prone calculations of pi, my own writing has fallen prey. In the fourth paragraph, the Zu Chongzhi approximation is 355/113. Ray

  5. Ron Katznelson March 16, 2018 7:49 pm

    Thanks for this fun article.

    355/113 is the fourth rational approximation to ? in the sequence 3, 22/7, 333/106, 355/113, 103993/33102, 104348/33215, … . These are successive convergents of continued fraction expansion of ? written as [3; 7, 15, 1, 292, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 14, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, …] =
    =3+1/(7+1/(15+1/(1+1/(292+ …)))). See

    The convergents of a continued fraction expansion of any real number X provide the closest successive rational approximations N/M to X with the least number of terms and the smallest integers N or M. The rational approximations for ? listed above are good to 0, 2, 4, 6, 9, 9, 9, 10, 11, 11, 12, 13, … decimal digits, respectively. See

    I have used this number-theoretic method to derive rational approximation solutions for constructing low phase noise synthesizers as disclosed in my US patent titled Rational frequency synthesizers employing digital commutators” at See column 4.

  6. Ray Van Dyke March 23, 2018 11:30 am

    Ron: very interesting! Since I was a math/computer science/engineering major, I fins these formulas and observations quite interesting! Regards, Ray