William Shanks

William Shanks ( born January 25, 1812 in Corse Side, Northumberland, † 1882 in Houghton- le-Spring, County Durham ) is famous for his handwritten calculations of the circle of pi in 1853 he published his calculation of the first 607 decimal places of Pi 20 years later, in 1873, he expanded his work and published another 100 points, then a record. DF Ferguson 1945 could prove a table calculating machine that Shanks calculations were correct only for the first 527 points.

As a basis for its calculations Shanks served already in 1706 by John Machin formula for determining the first 100 decimal places used

In addition, Shanks set yet but lots of other calculations. He devoted himself to the example of the calculation of Euler's number as well as different values ​​of the natural logarithm and published a table of all primes up to 60,000.

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