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Pi

In Our Time

00:00

The Infinite Series of Numbers

James Gregory in Scotland at St. Andrews does 200 years later and then Leibniz, one of the co-inveters of calculus, is to rethink pie in particular. He finds that pie can be given by this two times the following sum. If you do that forever and multiply by four, you will get pie precisely. What an amazing act of the imagination. And once that infinite series means that whenever you cut it off, at whatever stage, after 50 numbers, a million number, it's very, very nearly accurate but never quite. That's right. Even with supercomputers, Macho Matzis, you call them, pounding through, he touches not wall

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