Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only one survives today—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the most magnificent structure of antiquity.
When researchers studied this monument of Egyptian architecture, they were astonished: the pyramid’s height, they found, equals one billionth of the distance to the Sun. Divide the perimeter of the pyramid’s base by twice its height and you get 3.14159—a number European mathematicians only rediscovered in the 16th century. Archimedes had worked out only three digits of pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter), while the pyramid’s builders, about 3,000 years earlier, had effectively calculated it to six decimal places.
And that’s not all. If you divide the length of one side of the base by the length of a year—365.2422 days—you arrive at one ten-millionth of the length of Earth’s polar axis. That level of precision would make even modern astronomers envious.
Moreover, the pyramid is aligned with the cardinal directions with astonishing accuracy. Some scholars see this as evidence of the architects’ deep astronomical and mathematical knowledge; others argue these alignments are just a game of numbers. Math enthusiasts can join the debate.
