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| The first advanced knowledge of the value of pi originated in China, but was forgotten there in the fourteenth century . When the Jesuits went to China in the seventeenth century, the Chinese were impressed by the European knowledge of pi. Here we see a diagram explaining Liu Hui's exhaustion method in 264 AD for finding the value of pi. By inscribing 3072 sides of a polygon in a circle, Liu Hui was able to overtake the Greeks and compute the value to a fifth decimal place at 3.14159. By the fifth century, the value was computed to ten decimal places. In Europe, pi was only approximately calculated to seven places by the year 1600, a full twelve hundred years later. |
