# What does "Pi" mean? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 30, 2003, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610 "2003-09-30T02:19:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2003, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610/41 "2003-10-04T02:08:45Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by amore ac studio \* > \*\*I remember a historical note in one of the calculus textbooks of my father’s generation, which mentioned that if Archimedes had not been killed by the Romans, he probably would have gone on to invent the integral calculus. He had already established many area and volume formulas using techniques that we would classify today as calculus, but in order to convince his contemporaries who were trained in the Euclidean method of geometry, he had to derive his results again without the calculus. \*\* According to this recent [Nova program on Archimedes](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/) a newly discovered palimpsest of Archimedes’ The Method talks about cutting a circular wedge into an infinite number of parts and adding together their individual volumes to measure the total volume. Which is essentially calculus in all but name. The question then becomes why, if this manuscript was available widely, no one else ever looked at his works and tried to continue them. His name was significant enough to those after him, no matter what his contemporaries thought. ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2003, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610/42 "2003-10-04T04:37:27Z")
I expect it’s because dealing with limits is extremely difficult without algebra, and the Greeks distrusted all math other than geometry. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2003, 12:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610/43 "2003-10-04T12:22:46Z")
There have been several explanations of why the _Method_ seems to have been neglected. For a start, the assumption that it was widely available can be questioned. It was originally written as a letter to Eratosthenes and nothing is known of its readership between then and its rediscovery in 1899, other than that someone thought enough of it to make a copy in the 10th century and that someone later thought this copy unwanted. Furthermore, its style, as well as its content, stands out amongst the surviving Greek mathematical texts. Whereas the normal style is to write-up very polished versions of arguments, this is more of a “look under the hood”. Elsewhere Archimedes wrote-up similar results that have been surmised to have been obtained by the same method, but where the text gives no clues to. In presenting the polished version, he may have covered his tracks. This wasn’t necessarily to help “convince” his colleagues - it was just the standard way of doing things. The _Method_ may thus have not been seen by contemporaries as a proper work. If many of them saw it at all. It may even have been the case that some of them were working with similar ideas. In his _History of the Calculus_ (1949; Dover, 1959), Boyer’s conclusion is that even Archimedes ideas fell far short of the notion of an infinite limit. Furthermore, he suggests that the difference in the 17th century was that standards of mathematical rigour had decayed. Calculus could thus be developed in a useable form, with the nasty conceptual issues not being properly addressed until the 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![moejuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/57b2e6/32.png) [@moejuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moejuck)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2003, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610/44 "2003-10-04T15:00:09Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by N9IWP \* > \*\*Read “Contact” for one reason to figure out pi to a zillion digits. > Bragging rights is probably the main reason. > > Brian \*\* I hope that you already know there is no such number. ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2003, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610/45 "2003-10-04T15:01:16Z")
If you wanted to accelerate the development of mathematics, it would probably have been more useful to give Archimedes the works of Descarte rather than Newton. Demonstrating that algebra and geometry are fundamentally identical would have had profound effects on Greek thinking. Presumably. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-pi-mean/204610.md?page=2)