Their ENIAC system performed
the first electronic computation of pi to 2,037 decimal places. It is interested
to not that this computer occupied a warehouse the size of a high school fieldhouse and it’s only purpose was to calculate pi, however the computer
represented a huge jump in the research of pi. It opened doors to the intricate
calculations of pi we see in our modern day. From this point on, all new
calculations of pi would be done electronically.
In 1958, Genuys found pi to
10,000 decimal places, and in 1962 David Shanks, a relative of the 19th centuary
mathematician William Shanks, along with Wrench found pi to 100,000 decimal
places. In 1973 Guillard and Bouyer were the first to find pi to one million
places. The research in pi in the 1980’s to the present has pretty much moved
across the pacific to Japan. In 1982, Y Tamura and Y Kanada found pi to 8
million places and in 1986 Kanada found it to 33,554,000 places;in 1987
134,217,728 places and in 1988 he found pi to 201,326,000 places. In November of
1989 Kanada brought the one billion mark by finding pi to 1,073,741,799 places.
The great year of 1995 however made the most progress in the calculation of pi.
Kanada found pi to 4 billion places, and soon after Borwien, a German
mathematician found pi to 10 billion places, a great leap from the biblical
approximation of 3. Today you can download files off the internet of values of
pi to 2.5 million places. On the next page you can examine pi to 50,000 places,
a relatively low number for today’s standards, however still impressive in its
own way.
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