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(although pi will still work, if you'd prefer). In the REPL, for example, type \pi TAB to insert the Unicode character U+03C0: julia> πĪnd you can use it freely in expressions: kepler_solver.(, 0) ≈
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Julia embraces the Unicode standard enthusiastically, so it's very easy to use the appropriate Greek (and other Unicode) letters in your code. It's an impressive achievement, not least by his typesetter, and it might make you appreciate your next LATEX session more than usual.īut although Jones was one of the first, he wasn't influential enough to inspire many followers, and it was the more famous Leonhard Euler and his use of the π symbol later in the century that did more to establish the Greek letter's primary mathematical meaning for posterity: His Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, or A New Introduction to the Mathematics has been digitized and can be viewed here. Jones, like all mathematicians, used a lot of symbols. (He managed 35 decimal places, and asked for it to be engraved on his tombstone.)
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Jones also refers to it as Van Ceulen's Number, after the Dutch mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen, who spent a major part of his life calculating the value. Jones used the Greek letter in various places both to indicate the number and, like some of his predecessors, to refer to the periphery or perimeter (Greek περιφέρεια) of a circle, and to label points in diagrams, as we would use P and Q today. It's from a mathematics text book written by William Jones and published in 1706: Patricia Rothman suggested that the following page could contain one of the earliest uses of the Greek character to indicate the concept. Although we've known about "Archimedes' constant" for a few millennia, we've been referring to it as the Greek letter π only since the 1700s.