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Maths pi-oneer. William Hogarth/National Portrait Gallery

One of the most important numbers in maths might today be named after the Greek letter π or “pi,” but the convention of representing it this way actually doesn’t come from Greece at all. It comes from the pen of an 18th century farmer’s son and largely self-taught mathematician from the small island of Anglesey in Wales. The Welsh Government has even renamed Pi Day (on March 14 or 3/14, which matches the first three digits of pi, 3.14) as “Pi Day Cymru.”

The importance of the number we now call pi has been known about since ancient Egyptian times. It allows you to calculate the circumference and area of a circle from its diameter (and vice versa). But it’s also a number that crops up across all scientific disciplines from cosmology to thermodynamics. Yet even after mathematicians worked out how to calculate pi accurately to over 100 decimal places at the start of the 18th century, we didn’t have an agreed symbol for the number.

From accountant to maths pioneer

This all changed thanks to William Jones who was born in 1674 in the parish of Llanfihangel Tre’r Beirdd. After attending a charity school, Jones landed a job as a merchant’s accountant and then as a maths teacher on a warship, before publishing A New Compendium of the Whole Art of Navigation, his first book in 1702 on the mathematics of navigation. On his return to Britain he began to teach maths in London, possibly starting by holding classes in coffee shops for a small fee.

Shortly afterwards he published Synopsis palmariorum matheseos, a summary of the current state of the art developments in mathematics which reflected his own particular interests. In it is the first recorded use of the symbol π as the number that gives the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

• Read more: 9 Great Reads about Pi, The World’s Favorite Mathematical Constant

We typically think of this number as being about 3.14, but Jones rightly suspected that the digits after its decimal point were infinite and non-repeating. This meant it could never be “expressed in numbers,” as he put it. That was why he recognised the number needed its own symbol. It is commonly thought that he chose pi either because it is the first letter of the word for periphery (περιφέρεια) or because it is the first letter of the word for perimeter (περίμετρος), or both.

In the pages of his Synopsis, Jones also showed his familiarity with the notion of an infinite series and how it could help calculate pi far more accurately than was possible just by drawing and measuring circles. An infinite series is the total of all the numbers in a sequence that goes on forever, for example ½ + ¼ + ⅛ + and so on. Adding an infinite sequence of ever-smaller fractions like this can bring you closer and closer to a number with an infinite number of digits after the decimal point — just like pi. So by defining the right sequence, mathematicians were able to calculate pi to an increasing number of decimal places.

• Read more:10 Ways to Celebrate Pi Day 2016

Infinite series also assist our understanding of rational numbers, more commonly referred to as fractions. Irrational numbers are the ones, like pi, that can’t be written as a fraction, which is why Jones decided it needed its own symbol. What he wasn’t able to do was prove with maths that the digits of pi definitely were infinite and non-repeating and so that the number was truly irrational. This would eventually be achieved in 1768 by the French mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert. Jones dipped his toes into the subject and showed an intuitive grasp of the complexity of pi but lacked the analytical tools to enable him to develop his ideas further.

Scientific success

Despite this — and his obscure background — Jones’s book was a success and led him to become an important and influential member of the scientific establishment. He was noticed and befriended by two of Britain’s foremost mathematicians — Edmund Halley and Sir Isaac Newton — and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1711. He later became the editor and publisher of many of Newton’s manuscripts and built up an extraordinary library that was one of the greatest collections of books on science and mathematics ever known, and only recently fully dispersed.

Despite this success, the use of the symbol π spread slowly at first. It was popularised in 1737 by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 18th century, who likely came across Jones’ work while studying Newton at the University of Basel. His endorsement of the symbol in his own work ensured that it received wide publicity, yet even then the symbol wasn’t adopted universally until as late as 1934. Today π is instantly recognised worldwide but few know that its history can be traced back to a small village in the heart of Anglesey.

Gareth Ffowc Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Education, Bangor University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This “pi plate” shows some of the progress toward finding all the digits of pi. In 1946, ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, calculated 2,037 digits of pi in 70 hours. The most recent calculation found more than 13 trillion digits of pi in 208 days. Piledhigheranddeeper, CC BY-SA

The number represented by pi (π) is used in calculations whenever something round (or nearly so) is involved, such as for circles, spheres, cylinders, cones and ellipses. Its value is necessary to compute many important quantities about these shapes, such as understanding the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference and area (circumference=2πr; area=πr²). Pi also appears in the calculations to determine the area of an ellipse and in finding the radius, surface area and volume of a sphere.

Our world contains many round and near-round objects; finding the exact value of pi helps us build, manufacture and work with them more accurately. Historically, people had only very coarse estimations of pi (such as 3, or 3.12, or 3.16), and while they knew these were estimates, they had no idea how far off they might be. The search for the accurate value of pi led not only to more accuracy, but also to the development of new concepts and techniques, such as limits and iterative algorithms, which then became fundamental to new areas of mathematics.

Finding the actual value of pi

Archimedes. André Thévet (1584)

Between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, people used trial-and-error approximations of pi, without doing any math or considering potential errors. The earliest written approximations of pi are 3.125 in Babylon (1900-1600 B.C.) and 3.1605 in ancient Egypt (1650 B.C.). Both approximations start with 3.1 — pretty close to the actual value, but still relatively far off.

Archimedes’ method of calculating pi involved polygons with more and more sides. Leszek Krupinski, CC BY-SA

The first rigorous approach to finding the true value of pi was based on geometrical approximations. Around 250 B.C., the Greek mathematician Archimedes drew polygons both around the outside and within the interior of circles. Measuring the perimeters of those gave upper and lower bounds of the range containing pi. He started with hexagons; by using polygons with more and more sides, he ultimately calculated three accurate digits of pi: 3.14. Around A.D. 150, Greek-Roman scientist Ptolemy used this method to calculate a value of 3.1416.

Liu Hui’s method of calculating pi also used polygons, but in a slightly different way. Gisling and Pbroks13, CC BY-SA

Independently, around A.D. 265, Chinese mathematician Liu Hui created another simple polygon-based iterative algorithm. He proposed a very fast and efficient approximation method, which gave four accurate digits. Later, around A.D. 480, Zu Chongzhi adopted Liu Hui’s method and achieved seven digits of accuracy. This record held for another 800 years.

• Read more: 9 Great Reads about Pi, The World’s Favorite Mathematical Constant

In 1630, Austrian astronomer Christoph Grienberger arrived at 38 digits, which is the most accurate approximation manually achieved using polygonal algorithms.

Moving beyond polygons

The development of infinite series techniques in the 16th and 17th centuries greatly enhanced people’s ability to approximate pi more efficiently. An infinite series is the sum (or much less commonly, product) of the terms of an infinite sequence, such as ½, ¼, 1/8, 1/16, … 1/(2ⁿ). The first written description of an infinite series that could be used to compute pi was laid out in Sanskrit verse by Indian astronomer Nilakantha Somayaji around 1500 A.D., the proof of which was presented around 1530 A.D.

Sir Isaac Newton Wellcome Trust, CC BY

In 1665, English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton used infinite series to compute pi to 15 digits using calculus he and German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discovered. After that, the record kept being broken. It reached 71 digits in 1699, 100 digits in 1706, and 620 digits in 1956 — the best approximation achieved without the aid of a calculator or computer.

In tandem with these calculations, mathematicians were researching other characteristics of pi. Swiss mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777) first proved that pi is an irrational number — it has an infinite number of digits that never enter a repeating pattern. In 1882, German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that pi cannot be expressed in a rational algebraic equation (such as pi²=10 or 9pi⁴ – 240pi² + 1492 = 0).

Toward even more digits of pi

Bursts of calculations of even more digits of pi followed the adoption of iterative algorithms, which repeatedly build an updated value by using a calculation performed on the previous value. A simple example of an iterative algorithm allows you to approximate the square root of 2 as follows, using the formula (x+2/x)/2:

• (2+2/2)/2 = 1.5
• (1.5+2/1.5)/2 = 1.4167
• (1.4167+2/1.4167)/2 = 1.4142, which is a very close approximation already.

Advances toward more digits of pi came with the use of a Machin-like algorithm (a generalization of English mathematician John Machin’s formula developed in 1706) and the Gauss-Legendre algorithm (late 18th century) in electronic computers (invented mid-20th century). In 1946, ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, calculated 2,037 digits of pi in 70 hours. The most recent calculation found more than 13 trillion digits of pi in 208 days!

• Read more: 10 Ways to Celebrate Pi Day 2016

It has been widely accepted that for most numerical calculations involving pi, a dozen digits provides sufficient precision. According to mathematicians Jörg Arndt and Christoph Haenel, 39 digits are sufficient to perform most cosmological calculations, because that’s the accuracy necessary to calculate the circumference of the observable universe to within one atom’s diameter. Thereafter, more digits of pi are not of practical use in calculations; rather, today’s pursuit of more digits of pi is about testing supercomputers and numerical analysis algorithms.

Calculating pi by yourself

There are also fun and simple methods for estimating the value of pi. One of the best-known is a method called “Monte Carlo.”

A square with inscribed circle. Deweirdifier

The method is fairly simple. To try it at home, draw a circle and a square around it (as at left) on a piece of paper. Imagine the square’s sides are of length 2, so its area is 4; the circle’s diameter is therefore 2, and its area is pi. The ratio between their areas is pi/4, or about 0.7854.

Now pick up a pen, close your eyes and put dots on the square at random. If you do this enough times, and your efforts are truly random, eventually the percentage of times your dot landed inside the circle will approach 78.54 percent — or 0.7854.

Now you’ve joined the ranks of mathematicians who have calculated pi through the ages.

Xiaojing Ye, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Georgia State University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.