Pi
Knowledge of the number pi passed back into Europe and into the hands of the Hebrews, who made the number important in a section of the Bible called the Old Testament. After this, the most common way of trying to find pi was to draw a shape of many sides inside any circle, and use the area of the shape to find pi. The Greek philosopher Archimedes, for example, used a polygon shape that had 96 sides in order to find the value of pi, but the Chinese in 500  were able to use a polygon with 16,384 sides to find the value of pi. The Greeks, like Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, were also busy with finding out other properties of the circle, such as how to make squares of circles and squaring the number pi. Since then, many people have been trying to find out more and more exact values of pi.