Two Mathematical Innovations – one Greek, one Indian Pi & Zero

From the first year of secondary school to postgraduate studies at universities around the world, there is nowhere to hide from Π. It is a nightmare for maths-hating teenagers and a never-ending mystery for professors who teach it in the daytime and dream about it at night. Since Archimedes tried to ‘square the circle’ in third century B.C.E. Sicily, at that time a part of the Greek Empire, mathematicians have wondered about this number. Nowadays, supercomputers can calculate Π to 1.4 trillion places, although we only need the first thirty-two digits to work out the size of the universe. So, why does Π continue to excite scientists and bore school kids more than two thousand years after Archimedes first played with the idea of this strange number?