Ncurtisbrown Posted May 19, 2010 Share Posted May 19, 2010 How were numbers like e and pie found? I use them so much in school and have yet to discover how they were discovered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the tree Posted May 19, 2010 Share Posted May 19, 2010 How were numbers like e and pi found?pi has been known about for thousands of years, at least since the time of the Ancient Egyptians around 2600BC People mostly just figured that such a ratio must exist and used whatever approximation they could - probably originally measured by laying a piece of string around a circle and then measuring that. Archimedes came up with reasonable approximations for pi by inscribing polygons of a large degree around 250BC, known now as the method of exhaustion, considering that there weren't many computational resources available - regular polygons didn't make terrible approximations of circles: It wasn't until the development of calculus that anyone knew for sure that pi was in fact a transcendental number and it could really be studied in detail. Logarithms cropped up in the 1500s but the first mentions of e weren't until the 1600s, apparently as part of a solution to a problem of compound interest. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ncurtisbrown Posted May 20, 2010 Author Share Posted May 20, 2010 Wow, that was a great answer, thanks for helping expand my view on those numbers! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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