"Squares have become symbolic of our human ability to measure, to solve, and to partition. Where circles denote the infinite, squares indicate the finite. Where circles reflect the mystery of the natural world, squares enabled early civilizations to segment the land for farming and for ownership."

"And so back to the problem. For four thousand years of civilization, it has seemed natural that we, as humans, would be able to find a mathematical, geometrical relationship between the circle and the square; that we could measure the common circle as we measure squares or even triangles. It has always seemed logical, paradoxically, that we could discover limits to the infinite and could somehow calculate nature. But we were wrong."

David Blatner, The Joy of Pi
reprinted without permission