|
William Shanks (25 January 1812 – June 1882)〔GRO Register of Deaths: JUN 1882 10a 252 HOUGHTON - William Shanks, aged 70〕 was a British amateur mathematician. Shanks is famous for his calculation of ''π'' to 707 places, accomplished in 1873, which, however, was only correct up to the first 527 places. This error was highlighted in 1944 by D. F. Ferguson (using a mechanical desk calculator).〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Shanks.html )〕 Shanks earned his living by owning a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring, which left him enough time to spend on his hobby of calculating mathematical constants. His routine was as follows: he would calculate new digits all morning; and then he would spend all afternoon checking his morning's work. To calculate ''π'', Shanks used Machin's formula: : Shanks' approximation was the longest expansion of ''π'' until the advent of the electronic digital computer about one century later. Shanks also calculated ''e'' and the Euler–Mascheroni constant γ to many decimal places. He published a table of primes up to 60 000 and found the natural logarithms of 2, 3, 5 and 10 to 137 places. Shanks died in Houghton-le-Spring, city of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England in June 1882, aged 70, and was buried at the local Hillside Cemetery on 17 June 1882.〔(Houghton le Spring Hillside Cemetery )〕 ==See also== *Chronology of computation of π *History of π 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William Shanks」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|