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By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to computeit.For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For manypurposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you wanta better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here's pi to manymore digits: 3.14159265358979323846. The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or "pir squared":A = pi*r^2

A very brief history of pi

Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babyloniansknew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn'tknow its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that itwas a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8(3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and muchharder to work with. For more, see

A History of Pi

by Petr Beckman (DorsetPress). The modern symbol for pi [] was first used in our modern sense in 1706by William Jones, who wrote: There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particularCurve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as forinstance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 -4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + ... = 3.14159... = (see

A History of Mathematical Notation

by Florian Cajori).Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosenas the letter to represent the number 3.141592... because the letter [] inGreek, pronounced like our letter 'p', stands for 'perimeter'.

About Pi

Pi is an infinite decimal. Unlike numbers such as 3, 9.876, and 4.5, whichhave finitely many nonzero numbers to the right of the decimal place, pihas infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point.If you write pi down in decimal form, the numbers to the right of the 0never repeat in a pattern. Some infinite decimals do have patterns - forinstance, the infinite decimal .3333333... has all 3's to the right of thedecimal point, and in the number .123456789123456789123456789... thesequence 123456789 is repeated. However, although manymathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has beendiscovered - in fact, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved that there

cannot

beany such repeating pattern.