Number is up for the English mathematician who miscalculated pi

From: The Sunday Telegraph London | Date: January 19, 2003| Author: | Copyright information

Some mathematicians claim to have calculated pi to billions of decimal places.

How do they know that they're right?

Michael Jones, via email

Over the centuries many mathematicians, including Sir Isaac Newton, have whiled away their time calculating ever more digits of pi - though not always with 100 per cent success. In 1873 the English mathematician William Shanks held the world record with a hand- calculated value of 707 digits, the result of a monumental effort that took up 15 years of his life. Not surprisingly, there was little enthusiasm for checking Shanks's work by repeating it. There ...

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