What is Pi good for?

Pi is good for lots of things. In fact, pi is one of the few mathematical symbols to make it out of the text book and into everyday life, just like the "Golden Ratio." The golden ratio is given as follows: a/(a+b) = a/b. It is very useful for many things. Such as the dimensions of a credit card, or the Fibonacci sequence. The main difference between the two is that the golden ratio was derived from nature, and pi is man made.

Pi has been know of for a long time, but much of the work done on it was done by Archimedes. He was Greek, that is why we use a greek letter for pi, when we arn't feeling lazy and just use "pi." Archimedes was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher. He is widely regarded as the most important scientist in antiquity (from Wikipedia). He did work with polygons and circles to estimate the correct value of pi.

Archimedes was so interested in pi because in addition to being a mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher, he was an amateur chef. A chef was not viewed as a worthy profession for men, and as such was often practiced behind closed doors, late at night. If the pope were to catch a male chef, it was death by fire (except for sushi chefs who were flayed alive).

Archimedes initial love was for cobblers and jelly dough nuts. However without a local supermarket to provide him with quality ingredients it was difficult to get consistent results. One day as he tried to cook some of the ingredients together to get a gold crust, he made a pie, with burnt edges. With the exception of the edge it was instant love.

For the next 30 years he experimented with ways to get a perfectly golden crust without burning the edges. He tried different flours, fillings, and sugar (cane vs sugar beets). Eventually he began to alter the ratio of the pie diameter to the circumference. He found that a small ratio (around 2.5 or lower) led to an increase in the burnt edges, and large ratios (over 4) led to soggy centers. After much trial and error he discovered the perfect ratio, 3.1415926... This gave pies with golden flaky crust which were perfectly baked.

Classical history says Archimedes was killed by a roman soldier during the Second Punic War after telling off the soldier for looking at his circles. The fact is that the soldier was a fall guy. Archimedes bled to death after removing 6.8584 fingers. He was preparing a brief to Rome to switch from a base 10 number system to a base pi number system.