Palais de la Découverte
France
Jean Baptiste Perrin, the Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1926, established the museum in 1937 as part of an international exhibition on "Arts and techniques in modern life". Following the exhibition's conclusion, the French government repurposed the museum into a permanent institution, occupying 25,000 square metres within the west wing of the Grand Palais, which was originally built for the Exposition Universelle in 1900 to the designs of architect Albert-Félix-Théophile Thomas.
In 2010, the museum merged with the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie to form a new institution named universcience with two locations.
Today, the Palais de la Découverte offers visitors permanent exhibits covering mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology, showcasing interactive experiments accompanied by expert commentary. Additionally, it boasts a Zeiss planetarium featuring a 15-metre dome.
Pi room
Within the museum, there exists a round chamber affectionately known as the "pi room". Adorning the walls of this space are 707 wooden characters of the number π, affixed to the ceiling which resembles a dome. These characters are based on a computation conducted by English mathematician William Shanks in 1873. However, an error was discovered in the 528th digit of the calculation in 1946, and subsequently corrected in 1949.