Civilizational Collapse (Part 5)

A tale of civilizational decline and rebirth.

Around 250 BC Archimedes found a general algorithm for computing pi to arbitrary accuracy, and used it to prove that 223/71

By the Middle Ages, math had backslid so much in Western Europe that scholars believed pi was actually equal to 22/7.

Around 1020, a mathematician named Franco of Liège got interested in the ancient Greek problem of squaring the circle. But since he believed that pi is 22/7, he started studying the square root of 22/7.

Ther...