Pi can be calculated using a random sample of darts thrown at a square and circle target.

The area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. This is half of a circle with a radius of 1 (no units) such that it would have an area of pi/2.

Pi holds a special place in the realm of math. It’s an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter.

On this day of numerical glory, get to know pi in an unusual way: using the elastic collision of two different masses and a wall.

Using that short version of pi is easy and works fine for simple problems. If you’ve ever used the pi button on a calculator, that probably uses pi rounded to ten decimal places.

Talk about perfect timing — a Google engineer revealed she broke the world record for calculating pi on National Pi Day.

Archimedes’ treatise Measurement of a Circle — which helped spread his process for calculating pi around the world, according to the American Mathematical Society —was part of this manuscript.

This Pi Day, try calculating everyone’s favourite mathematical constant using balls and a cardboard tube, thanks to a mathematical trick involving the balls’ masses ...

Running on a real 4004 with peripheral hardware simulated inside an STM32, it spent 3 hours, 31 minutes and 13 seconds calculating 255 digits of pi, and correctly, too.

Bursts of calculations of even more digits of pi followed the adoption of iterative algorithms, which repeatedly build an updated value by using a calculation performed on the previous value.