For people in the twentieth century, the fact that Pi was an infinite, non-repeating decimal was practically common knowledge. There were even competitions to see who could recite more digits after the decimal point.
But people in ancient times believed Pi was finite. The ancient Babylonians even thought its value was 3. The Greek people went a step further and tried to calculate Pi's exact value, drawing polygons inside a circle. The more sides the polygon had, the closer its shape came to a circle.
When Leonardo da Vinci tackled the problem of equal areas between the circle and square in the Vitruvian Man, he used a cylinder. He made its height half its radius, stood it upright, and rolled it one full turn. The area it rolled over formed a rectangle whose area was roughly equal to that of the cylinder's circular face.
This was all because Pi was an irrational number. The man who proved it was irrational was John Heinrich Lambert, the mathematician the priests had just mentioned, who had been received by Frederick the Great. He was a very ugly man and the son of a tailor, yet he had educated himself into success.
Later, John Heinrich Lambert not only proved that Pi was irrational but also deduced that Pi and e were transcendental numbers. Though he had made outstanding contributions to mathematics, the priests had just defined him as a philosopher.
Descartes was regarded as a mathematician, yet he had also published books on philosophy. Two centuries before Henrietta Leavitt, Lambert had already deduced that the Solar System was only part of the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way was part of a super-system revolving around a dark center. Thus emerged the concept of a vast yet finite universe with a center.
But none