Stargeezer Smith on Nostr: I've been moving through the Great Course lecture series in the history of ...

I've been moving through the Great Course lecture series in the history of Mathematics. It had an interesting section on how the ancients struggled with pi.

Interestingly they knew of the pi approximation 355/113, which I was unaware of until I read the book "Starting Forth" which explained the Forth fraction multiply operator */.

That operator made a handy way to work with science constants which could be accurately expressed as a ratio of integers, as Forth did only fixed point math.