Ludolph van Ceulen Memorial in Leiden, Netherlands

Pi is an irrational number with an infinite amount of decimals. While 3.14 is good enough for high school students and most engineers often use 4.0 just to be sure, there are actually a lot of uses for the rest of the decimals, primarily in cryptography. These days we know pi down to tens of trillions of decimals, but not too long ago calculating a few dozen could literally take a lifetime.  Many people in history spent years of their lives calculating a few decimals of pi, using a method…

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