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William Shanks
Amateur calculator, school owner

William Shanks

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Amateur calculator, school owner
Work field
Gender
Male
Place of birth
Durham, United Kingdom
Place of death
Houghton-le-Spring, United Kingdom
The details (from wikipedia)

Biography

Shanks' approximation to π, published in 1853

William Shanks (25 January 1812 – June 1882) 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).

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:

π4=4arctan(15)arctan(1239){\displaystyle {\frac {\pi }{4}}=4\arctan \left({\frac {1}{5}}\right)-\arctan \left({\frac {1}{239}}\right)}

Shanks's approximation was the longest expansion of π until the advent of the digital electronic 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, County Durham, England in June 1882, aged 70, and was buried at the local Hillside Cemetery on 17 June 1882.

The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
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