Bye, bye, Archimedes' pi

Just as not every physicist cites Einstein's 1905 papers and not every mathematician cites the work of Pythagoras of Samos, not everyone needs to cite many of the work in their fields. This leads me to wonder -- just how much fundamental work goes uncited, especially in today's world of instant communication?

This I wonder as I often discuss technical ideas with friends, but work for a company which, in theory, owns that which I produce during the day. But do they own what I produce at night, or that which I cannot own, as I share it with another? How much of our own work can we erase, and how much of it goes unnoticed? Hence the palimpsest syndrome (as I'm interpreting it). As with employees of companies in the software business, I also wonder how many words and theories become wrapped into another and never see the light of day.

I mean, how old is pi? According to an article that's almost as old as me by E. Garfield in Essays of an Information Scientist Vol:2, p396-398, 1974-76 entitled "The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science--and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!" Archimedes estimated pi in the third century BC and others refined it from the sixteenth century until now. Of course, it wasn't called pi until 1706, when William Jones started using the greek letter. It's a good thing we don't have to keep track of all the work that's come before us, otherwise our references would outweigh our new material...Still, it would be nice to have some historian track the development of, say, computer science from BC until now, including Kruskal's algorithm, the significance of depth-first search, etc. I considered embarking on one back as an undergraduate. I'm sure someone has at least begun such a treatment.

My linguistic correlate: how many language/linguistic concepts have we lost citations on...is there a Complete History of Linguistics out there? I mean, the easy (and incorrect) answer is to say it's all Chomsky's doing. But I can see a lot of shaking heads out there...