Bakul Shah writes:From the Kings James Bible https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=1392613 1 Kings 7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about. There seem to be various explanations for the above but perhaps it is the genesis of the common "define the value of pi to be 3" idea?It could just be a translation problem - maybe it was 30 qubits and wasn't properly observed.
Going back to the area of the circle in ancient Egypt, virtually none of the authors mentioned above escaped the temptation to conclude that, whatever the precise method employed by the Egyptians, they had found a ‘good’ approximation for pi. However, does it really make sense to talk about the approximation of a concept or a number that did not exist in the Egyptian mind? The method used by the Egyptians (take 1/9 from the diameter and square the rest) had nothing to do with the ratio between circumference and diameter, now expressed by pi.
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