We love new like this....it's right up there with Jason McElwain's hoop dreams (CBS here). Student Recites 8,784 Digits of Pi Gaurav Rajav, 15, a high school student Tuesday recited 8,784 digits of Pi — the non-repeating and non-terminating decimal — likely placing him among the top Pi-reciters in the world. (Yahoo here) Way to get your Pi on, Guarav!
A very brief history of pi (more here)
Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it was 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 much harder to work with.
