John Wrench
John William Wrench (born October 13, 1911 in Westfield (New York) , † February 27, 2009 in Frederick (Maryland) ) was an American mathematician.
Wrench attended high school in Hamburg (New York) and studied at the University of Buffalo with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1933 and a master's degree in 1935 and received his doctorate in 1938 from Yale University ( The derivation of arctangent relations ). He initially taught at George Washington University . During World War II he pioneered computer calculations in applied mathematical warfare and classified research for the US Navy (such as underwater sound and underwater explosions) and in 1953 he became deputy director and later director of the applied mathematics laboratory of David Taylor Model Basin of the US Navy in Carderock. In 1974 he retired.
He has also taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, the University of Maryland at College Park and the American University.
He is known for precise calculations of the number pi , which he began before the age of electronic calculating machines. After William Shanks in England had calculated pi up to 707 digits in 1873 and DF Ferguson in the USA in 1945 to 808 digits, correcting an error by Shanks, Wrench carried out the determination from 1945 with Levi Smith on a mechanical table calculating machine up to 1161 Continue. In 1961 he calculated up to 100,265 digits with an IBM 7090 computer with Daniel Shanks Pi. That put them in the Guinness Book of Records and a hard copy of the calculation was presented at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. In addition to pi, he also calculated other mathematical constants with high accuracy, such as Euler's number . He published over 150 scientific papers.
He was a member of the Washington Academy of Sciences .
His hobbies were crossword puzzles, building dollhouses and playing the piano.
Fonts
- The evolution of extended decimal approximations to π, The Mathematics Teacher, Volume 53, 1960, pp. 644-650
- with Daniel Shanks: Calculation of π to 100,000 Decimals, Mathematics of Computation, Volume 16, 1962, pp. 76-99
Web links
- Obituary in Washington Post, March 25, 2009 ( March 31, 2009 memento on WebCite )
- Obituary in Frederick News ( March 24, 2009 memento on WebCite )
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Wrench in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wrench, John |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wrench, John William |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 13, 1911 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Westfield (New York) |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 27, 2009 |
| Place of death | Frederick (Maryland) |