William Shanks

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William Shanks (born January 25, 1812 in Corsenside , Northumberland , † 1882 in Houghton-le-Spring , Durham ) was an English mathematician. He is famous for his handwritten calculations of the circle number 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 digits, a record at the time. 1945 could DF Ferguson with a table calculator to prove that Shanks calculations were correct only for the first 527 points.

As a basis for his calculations, Shanks used the formula used by John Machin as early as 1706 to determine the first 100 decimal places

.

In addition, Shanks made many other calculations. For example, he devoted himself to calculating Euler's number and various values ​​of the natural logarithm and published a table of all prime numbers up to 60,000.

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