mathematical constant
A mathematical constant is a key number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol (e.g., an alphabet letter), or by mathematicians' names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. Cons ...
pi () in the history of mathematics reached an accuracy within 0.04% of the true value before the beginning of the
Common Era
Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...
. In
Chinese mathematics
Mathematics in China emerged independently by the 11th century BCE. The Chinese independently developed a real number system that includes significantly large and negative numbers, more than one numeral system ( base 2 and base 10), algebra, geo ...
, this was improved to approximations correct to what corresponds to about seven decimal digits by the 5th century.
Further progress was not made until the 15th century (through the efforts of Jamshīd al-Kāshī). Early modern mathematicians reached an accuracy of 35 digits by the beginning of the 17th century (
Ludolph van Ceulen
Ludolph van Ceulen (, ; 28 January 1540 – 31 December 1610) was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands.
Biography
Van Ceulen moved to Delft most likely in 1576 to teach fencing and mathematics and in 159 ...
), and 126 digits by the 19th century ( Jurij Vega), surpassing the accuracy required for any conceivable application outside of pure mathematics.
The record of manual approximation of is held by William Shanks, who calculated 527 digits correctly in 1853. Since the middle of the 20th century, the approximation of has been the task of electronic digital computers (for a comprehensive account, see Chronology of computation of ). On June 8, 2022, the current record was established by Emma Haruka Iwao with Alexander Yee's
y-cruncher
The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988.
It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in December ...
with 100 trillion digits.
Early history
The best known approximations to dating to before the Common Era were accurate to two decimal places; this was improved upon in
Chinese mathematics
Mathematics in China emerged independently by the 11th century BCE. The Chinese independently developed a real number system that includes significantly large and negative numbers, more than one numeral system ( base 2 and base 10), algebra, geo ...
in particular by the mid-first millennium, to an accuracy of seven decimal places. After this, no further progress was made until the late medieval period.
Some Egyptologists
have claimed that the ancient Egyptians used an approximation of as = 3.142857 (about 0.04% too high) from as early as the
Old Kingdom
In ancient Egyptian history, the Old Kingdom is the period spanning c. 2700–2200 BC. It is also known as the "Age of the Pyramids" or the "Age of the Pyramid Builders", as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid-builders of the Fourth ...
.
This claim has been met with skepticism.Babylonian mathematics usually approximated to 3, sufficient for the architectural projects of the time (notably also reflected in the description of
Solomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple (, , ), was the Temple in Jerusalem between the 10th century BC and . According to the Hebrew Bible, it was commissioned by Solomon in the United Kingdom of Israel before being inherited by t ...
in the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" '' Susa
Susa ( ; Middle elx, 𒀸𒋗𒊺𒂗, translit=Šušen; Middle and Neo- elx, 𒋢𒋢𒌦, translit=Šušun; Neo- Elamite and Achaemenid elx, 𒀸𒋗𒐼𒀭, translit=Šušán; Achaemenid elx, 𒀸𒋗𒐼, translit=Šušá; fa, شوش ...
in 1936 (dated to between the 19th and 17th centuries BCE) gives a better approximation of as = 3.125, about 0.528% below the exact value.
At about the same time, the Egyptian
Rhind Mathematical Papyrus
The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP; also designated as papyrus British Museum 10057 and pBM 10058) is one of the best known examples of ancient Egyptian mathematics. It is named after Alexander Henry Rhind, a Scotland, Scottish antiquarian, who ...
(dated to the Second Intermediate Period, c. 1600 BCE, although stated to be a copy of an older, Middle Kingdom text) implies an approximation of as ≈ 3.16 (accurate to 0.6 percent) by calculating the area of a circle via approximation with the
octagon
In geometry, an octagon (from the Greek ὀκτάγωνον ''oktágōnon'', "eight angles") is an eight-sided polygon or 8-gon.
A '' regular octagon'' has Schläfli symbol and can also be constructed as a quasiregular truncated square, t, w ...
.
Astronomical calculations in the ''
Shatapatha Brahmana
The Shatapatha Brahmana ( sa, शतपथब्राह्मणम् , Śatapatha Brāhmaṇam, meaning 'Brāhmaṇa of one hundred paths', abbreviated to 'SB') is a commentary on the Śukla (white) Yajurveda. It is attributed to the Vedic ...
'' (c. 6th century BCE) use a fractional approximation of .
The
Mahabharata
The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the '' Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the K ...
(500 BCE - 300 CE) offers an approximation of 3, in the ratios offered in
Bhishma Parva
The Bhishma Parva ( sa, भीष्म पर्व), or ''the Book of Bhishma,'' is the sixth of eighteen books of the Indian epic ''Mahabharata''. It is the only Parva in Mahabharata where the main hero is not Arjuna but is rather Bhishma and ...
verses: 6.12.40-45.
In the 3rd century BCE,
Archimedes
Archimedes of Syracuse (;; ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientis ...
proved the sharp inequalities < < , by means of regular 96-gons (accuracies of 2·10−4 and 4·10−4, respectively).
In the 2nd century CE,
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importanc ...
used the value , the first known approximation accurate to three decimal places (accuracy 2·10−5). It is equal to which is accurate to two
sexagesimal
Sexagesimal, also known as base 60 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form ...
Liu Hui
Liu Hui () was a Chinese mathematician who published a commentary in 263 CE on ''Jiu Zhang Suan Shu ( The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art).'' He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Eastern Han dynasty and lived in the state ...
in 263 CE computed to between and by inscribing a 96-gon and 192-gon; the average of these two values is (accuracy 9·10−5).
He also suggested that 3.14 was a good enough approximation for practical purposes. He has also frequently been credited with a later and more accurate result, π ≈ = 3.1416 (accuracy 2·10−6), although some scholars instead believe that this is due to the later (5th-century) Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi.
Zu Chongzhi is known to have computed to be between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, which was correct to seven decimal places. He also gave two other approximations of : π ≈ and π ≈ , which are not as accurate as his decimal result. The latter fraction is the best possible rational approximation of using fewer than five decimal digits in the numerator and denominator. Zu Chongzhi's results surpass the accuracy reached in Hellenistic mathematics, and would remain without improvement for close to a millennium.
In Gupta-era India (6th century), mathematician Aryabhata, in his astronomical treatise Āryabhaṭīya stated:
Approximating to four decimal places: π ≈ = 3.1416,How Aryabhata got the earth's circumference right Aryabhata stated that his result "approximately" (' "approaching") gave the circumference of a circle. His 15th-century commentator Nilakantha Somayaji ( Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics) has argued that the word means not only that this is an approximation, but that the value is incommensurable (irrational).
Maclaurin series
Maclaurin or MacLaurin is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Colin Maclaurin (1698–1746), Scottish mathematician
* Normand MacLaurin (1835–1914), Australian politician and university administrator
* Henry Normand MacLaurin ...
for arctangent, and then two infinite series for . One of them is now known as the Madhava–Leibniz series, based on
:
The other was based on
:
He used the first 21 terms to compute an approximation of correct to 11 decimal places as .
He also improved the formula based on arctan(1) by including a correction:
:
It is not known how he came up with this correction. Using this he found an approximation of to 13 decimal places of accuracy when = 75.
Jamshīd al-Kāshī (Kāshānī), a Persian astronomer and
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, correctly computed the fractional part of 2 to 9
sexagesimal
Sexagesimal, also known as base 60 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form ...
digits in 1424, and translated this into 16 decimal digits after the decimal point:
:
which gives 16 correct digits for π after the decimal point:
:
He achieved this level of accuracy by calculating the perimeter of a regular polygon with 3 × 228 sides.
16th to 19th centuries
In the second half of the 16th century, the French mathematician François Viète discovered an infinite product that converged on known as Viète's formula.
The German-Dutch mathematician
Ludolph van Ceulen
Ludolph van Ceulen (, ; 28 January 1540 – 31 December 1610) was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands.
Biography
Van Ceulen moved to Delft most likely in 1576 to teach fencing and mathematics and in 159 ...
(''circa'' 1600) computed the first 35 decimal places of with a 262-gon. He was so proud of this accomplishment that he had them inscribed on his tombstone.
In ''Cyclometricus'' (1621),
Willebrord Snellius
Willebrord Snellius (born Willebrord Snel van Royen) (13 June 158030 October 1626) was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician, Snell. His name is usually associated with the law of refraction of light known as Snell's law.
The lunar crater ...
demonstrated that the perimeter of the inscribed polygon converges on the circumference twice as fast as does the perimeter of the corresponding circumscribed polygon. This was proved by
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, ( , , ; also spelled Huyghens; la, Hugenius; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor, who is regarded as one of the greatest scientists o ...
in 1654. Snellius was able to obtain seven digits of from a 96-sided polygon.
In 1789, the Slovene mathematician Jurij Vega calculated the first 140 decimal places for , of which the first 126 were correct, and held the world record for 52 years until 1841, when William Rutherford calculated 208 decimal places, of which the first 152 were correct. Vega improved
John Machin
John Machin (bapt. c. 1686 – June 9, 1751) was a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London. He is best known for developing a quickly converging series for pi in 1706 and using it to compute pi to 100 decimal places.
History ...
's formula from 1706 and his method is still mentioned today.
The magnitude of such precision (152 decimal places) can be put into context by the fact that the circumference of the largest known object, the observable universe, can be calculated from its diameter (93billion
light-year
A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distance, astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 Orders of magnitude (numbers)#1012, trillion kilometers (), or 5.88  ...
s) to a precision of less than one Planck length (at , the shortest unit of length expected to be directly measurable) using expressed to just 62 decimal places.
The English amateur mathematician William Shanks, a man of independent means, calculated to 530 decimal places in January 1853, of which the first 527 were correct (the last few likely being incorrect due to round-off errors). He subsequently expanded his calculation to 607 decimal places in April 1853, but an error introduced right at the 530th decimal place rendered the rest of his calculation erroneous; due to the nature of Machin's formula, the error propagated back to the 528th decimal place, leaving only the first 527 digits correct once again. Twenty years later, Shanks expanded his calculation to 707 decimal places in April 1873. Due to this being an expansion of his previous calculation, all of the new digits were incorrect as well. Shanks was said to have calculated new digits all morning and would then spend all afternoon checking his morning's work. This was the longest expansion of until the advent of the electronic digital computer three-quarters of a century later.
20th and 21st centuries
In 1910, the Indian mathematician
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan (; born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, ; 22 December 188726 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, ...
found several rapidly converging infinite series of , including
:
which computes a further eight decimal places of with each term in the series. His series are now the basis for the fastest algorithms currently used to calculate . Even using just the first term gives
:
See
Ramanujan–Sato series In mathematics, a Ramanujan–Sato series generalizes Ramanujan’s pi formulas such as,
:\frac = \frac \sum_^\infty \frac \frac
to the form
:\frac = \sum_^\infty s(k) \frac
by using other well-defined sequences of integers s(k) obeying a c ...
.
From the mid-20th century onwards, all calculations of have been done with the help of
calculators
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-size ...
or
computers
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...
.
In 1944, D. F. Ferguson, with the aid of a mechanical desk calculator, found that William Shanks had made a mistake in the 528th decimal place, and that all succeeding digits were incorrect.
In the early years of the computer, an expansion of to decimal places was computed by Maryland mathematician Daniel Shanks (no relation to the aforementioned William Shanks) and his team at the
United States Naval Research Laboratory
The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological ...
in Washington, D.C. In 1961, Shanks and his team used two different power series for calculating the digits of . For one, it was known that any error would produce a value slightly high, and for the other, it was known that any error would produce a value slightly low. And hence, as long as the two series produced the same digits, there was a very high confidence that they were correct. The first 100,265 digits of were published in 1962. The authors outlined what would be needed to calculate to 1 million decimal places and concluded that the task was beyond that day's technology, but would be possible in five to seven years.
In 1989, the Chudnovsky brothers computed to over 1 billion decimal places on the
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...
IBM 3090
The IBM 3090 family is a family of mainframe computers that was a high-end successor to the IBM System/370 series, and thus indirectly the successor to the IBM System/360 launched 25 years earlier.
Announced on 12 February 1985, the press relea ...
using the following variation of Ramanujan's infinite series of :
:
Records since then have all been accomplished using the
Chudnovsky algorithm
The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988.
It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in Decembe ...
University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project b ...
computed to over 200 billion decimal places on the supercomputer HITACHI SR8000/MPP (128 nodes) using another variation of Ramanujan's infinite series of .
In November 2002, Yasumasa Kanada and a team of 9 others used the
Hitachi SR8000
The Hitachi SR8000 is a high-performance supercomputer manufactured by the Japanese Hitachi Ltd.
() is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japa ...
, a 64-node supercomputer with 1 terabyte of main memory, to calculate to roughly 1.24 trillion digits in around 600 hours (25days).
Recent Records
# In August 2009, a Japanese supercomputer called the
T2K Open Supercomputer
T, or t, is the twentieth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''tee'' (pronounced ), plural ''tees''. It is deri ...
more than doubled the previous record by calculating to roughly 2.6 trillion digits in approximately 73 hours and 36 minutes.
# In December 2009,
Fabrice Bellard
Fabrice Bellard (; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunicat ...
used a home computer to compute 2.7 trillion decimal digits of . Calculations were performed in base 2 (binary), then the result was converted to base 10 (decimal). The calculation, conversion, and verification steps took a total of 131 days.
# In August 2010, Shigeru Kondo used Alexander Yee's
y-cruncher
The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988.
It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in December ...
to calculate 5 trillion digits of . This was the world record for any type of calculation, but significantly it was performed on a home computer built by Kondo. The calculation was done between 4 May and 3 August, with the primary and secondary verifications taking 64 and 66 hours respectively.
# In October 2011, Shigeru Kondo broke his own record by computing ten trillion (1013) and fifty digits using the same method but with better hardware.
# In December 2013, Kondo broke his own record for a second time when he computed 12.1 trillion digits of .
# In October 2014, Sandon Van Ness, going by the pseudonym "houkouonchi" used y-cruncher to calculate 13.3 trillion digits of .
# In November 2016, Peter Trueb and his sponsors computed on y-cruncher and fully verified 22.4 trillion digits of (22,459,157,718,361 ( × 1012)). The computation took (with three interruptions) 105 days to complete, the limitation of further expansion being primarily storage space.
# In March 2019, Emma Haruka Iwao, an employee at
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, computed 31.4 (approximately ) trillion digits of pi using y-cruncher and Google Cloud machines. This took 121 days to complete.
# In January 2020, Timothy Mullican announced the computation of 50 trillion digits over 303 days.
#On August 14, 2021, a team (DAViS) at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons announced completion of the computation of to 62.8 (approximately ) trillion digits.
# On June 8th 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao announced on the Google Cloud Blog the computation of 100 trillion (1014) digits of over 158 days using Alexander Yee's
y-cruncher
The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988.
It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in December ...
.
Practical approximations
Depending on the purpose of a calculation, can be approximated by using fractions for ease of calculation. The most notable such approximations are (
relative error
The approximation error in a data value is the discrepancy between an exact value and some ''approximation'' to it. This error can be expressed as an absolute error (the numerical amount of the discrepancy) or as a relative error (the absolute er ...
of about 4·10−4) and (relative error of about 8·10−8).
Non-mathematical "definitions" of
Of some notability are legal or historical texts purportedly "defining " to have some rational value, such as the "
Indiana Pi Bill
The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the ...
" of 1897, which stated "the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four" (which would imply "") and a passage in the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" '' squaring the circle
Squaring the circle is a problem in geometry first proposed in Greek mathematics. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the area of a circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge. The difficul ...
".
The bill was nearly passed by the Indiana General Assembly in the U.S., and has been claimed to imply a number of different values for , although the closest it comes to explicitly asserting one is the wording "the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four", which would make , a discrepancy of nearly 2 percent. A mathematics professor who happened to be present the day the bill was brought up for consideration in the Senate, after it had passed in the House, helped to stop the passage of the bill on its second reading, after which the assembly thoroughly ridiculed it before postponing it indefinitely.
Temple in Jerusalem
The Temple in Jerusalem, or alternatively the Holy Temple (; , ), refers to the two now-destroyed religious structures that served as the central places of worship for Israelites and Jews on the modern-day Temple Mount in the Old City of Jeru ...
as having a diameter of 10
cubit
The cubit is an ancient unit of length based on the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. It was primarily associated with the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Israelites. The term ''cubit'' is found in the Bible regarding ...
s and a circumference of 30 cubits.
The issue is discussed in the
Talmud
The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law ('' halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the ce ...
and in
Rabbinic literature
Rabbinic literature, in its broadest sense, is the entire spectrum of rabbinic writings throughout Jewish history. However, the term often refers specifically to literature from the Talmudic era, as opposed to medieval and modern rabbinic w ...
. Among the many explanations and comments are these:
*
Rabbi Nehemiah
Rabbi Nehemiah was a rabbi who lived circa 150 AD (fourth generation of tannaim).
He was one of the great students of Rabbi Akiva, and one of the rabbis who received semicha from R' Judah ben Baba
The Talmud equated R' Nechemiah with Rabbi Ne ...
explained this in his ''Mishnat ha-Middot'' (the earliest known
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
text on
geometry
Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...
, ca. 150 CE) by saying that the diameter was measured from the ''outside'' rim while the circumference was measured along the ''inner'' rim. This interpretation implies a brim about 0.225 cubit (or, assuming an 18-inch "cubit", some 4 inches), or one and a third " handbreadths," thick (cf. and ).
*
Maimonides
Musa ibn Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (); la, Moses Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym Rambam ( he, רמב״ם), was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah ...
states (ca. 1168 CE) that can only be known approximately, so the value 3 was given as accurate enough for religious purposes. This is taken by some as the earliest assertion that is irrational.
There is still some debate on this passage in biblical scholarship. Many reconstructions of the basin show a wider brim (or flared lip) extending outward from the bowl itself by several inches to match the description given in In the succeeding verses, the rim is described as "a handbreadth thick; and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, like the flower of a lily: it received and held three thousand baths" , which suggests a shape that can be encompassed with a string shorter than the total length of the brim, e.g., a
Lilium
''Lilium'' () is a genus of herbaceous flowering plants growing from bulbs, all with large prominent flowers. They are the true lilies. Lilies are a group of flowering plants which are important in culture and literature in much of the world. M ...
Archimedes, in his ''Measurement of a Circle'', created the first algorithm for the calculation of based on the idea that the perimeter of any (convex) polygon inscribed in a circle is less than the circumference of the circle, which, in turn, is less than the perimeter of any circumscribed polygon. He started with inscribed and circumscribed regular hexagons, whose perimeters are readily determined. He then shows how to calculate the perimeters of regular polygons of twice as many sides that are inscribed and circumscribed about the same circle. This is a recursive procedure which would be described today as follows: Let and denote the perimeters of regular polygons of sides that are inscribed and circumscribed about the same circle, respectively. Then,
:
Archimedes uses this to successively compute and . Using these last values he obtains
:
It is not known why Archimedes stopped at a 96-sided polygon; it only takes patience to extend the computations.
Heron
The herons are long-legged, long-necked, freshwater and coastal birds in the family Ardeidae, with 72 recognised species, some of which are referred to as egrets or bitterns rather than herons. Members of the genera ''Botaurus'' and ''Ixobrychu ...
reports in his ''Metrica'' (about 60 CE) that Archimedes continued the computation in a now lost book, but then attributes an incorrect value to him.
Archimedes uses no trigonometry in this computation and the difficulty in applying the method lies in obtaining good approximations for the square roots that are involved. Trigonometry, in the form of a table of chord lengths in a circle, was probably used by Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria to obtain the value of given in the ''Almagest'' (circa 150 CE).
Advances in the approximation of (when the methods are known) were made by increasing the number of sides of the polygons used in the computation. A trigonometric improvement by Willebrord Snell (1621) obtains better bounds from a pair of bounds obtained from the polygon method. Thus, more accurate results were obtained from polygons with fewer sides.Viète's formula, published by François Viète in 1593, was derived by Viète using a closely related polygonal method, but with areas rather than perimeters of polygons whose numbers of sides are powers of two.
The last major attempt to compute by this method was carried out by Grienberger in 1630 who calculated 39 decimal places of using Snell's refinement.
Machin-like formula
For fast calculations, one may use formulae such as Machin's:
:
together with the
Taylor series
In mathematics, the Taylor series or Taylor expansion of a function is an infinite sum of terms that are expressed in terms of the function's derivatives at a single point. For most common functions, the function and the sum of its Taylor ser ...
expansion of the function
arctan
In mathematics, the inverse trigonometric functions (occasionally also called arcus functions, antitrigonometric functions or cyclometric functions) are the inverse functions of the trigonometric functions (with suitably restricted domains). Spe ...
(''x''). This formula is most easily verified using
polar coordinates
In mathematics, the polar coordinate system is a two-dimensional coordinate system in which each point on a plane is determined by a distance from a reference point and an angle from a reference direction. The reference point (analogous to th ...
of
complex number
In mathematics, a complex number is an element of a number system that extends the real numbers with a specific element denoted , called the imaginary unit and satisfying the equation i^= -1; every complex number can be expressed in the fo ...
s, producing:
( = is a solution to the Pell equation2−22 = −1.)
Formulae of this kind are known as '' Machin-like formulae''. Machin's particular formula was used well into the computer era for calculating record numbers of digits of , but more recently other similar formulae have been used as well.
For instance, Shanks and his team used the following Machin-like formula in 1961 to compute the first 100,000 digits of :
and they used another Machin-like formula,
as a check.
The record as of December 2002 by Yasumasa Kanada of Tokyo University stood at 1,241,100,000,000 digits. The following Machin-like formulae were used for this:
:
K. Takano (1982).
:
F. C. M. Størmer (1896).
Other classical formulae
Other formulae that have been used to compute estimates of include:
Liu Hui
Liu Hui () was a Chinese mathematician who published a commentary in 263 CE on ''Jiu Zhang Suan Shu ( The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art).'' He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Eastern Han dynasty and lived in the state ...
Euler
Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ...
:
:
Newton / Euler Convergence Transformation:
:
where (2''k'' + 1)!! denotes the product of the odd integers up to 2''k'' + 1.
Ramanujan:
:
David Chudnovsky and Gregory Chudnovsky:
:
Ramanujan's work is the basis for the
Chudnovsky algorithm
The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988.
It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in Decembe ...
, the fastest algorithms used, as of the turn of the millennium, to calculate .
Modern algorithms
Extremely long decimal expansions of are typically computed with iterative formulae like the
Gauss–Legendre algorithm The Gauss–Legendre algorithm is an algorithm to compute the digits of . It is notable for being rapidly convergent, with only 25 iterations producing 45 million correct digits of . However, it has some drawbacks (for example, it is computer ...
and
Borwein's algorithm In mathematics, Borwein's algorithm is an algorithm devised by Jonathan and Peter Borwein to calculate the value of . They devised several other algorithms. They published the book ''Pi and the AGM – A Study in Analytic Number Theory and Computa ...
. The latter, found in 1985 by
Jonathan
Jonathan may refer to:
*Jonathan (name), a masculine given name
Media
* ''Jonathan'' (1970 film), a German film directed by Hans W. Geißendörfer
* ''Jonathan'' (2016 film), a German film directed by Piotr J. Lewandowski
* ''Jonathan'' (2018 ...
and
Peter Borwein
Peter Benjamin Borwein (born St. Andrews, Scotland, May 10, 1953 – 23 August 2020) was a Canadian mathematician
and a professor at Simon Fraser University. He is known as a co-author of the paper which presented the Bailey–Borwein–P ...
, converges extremely quickly:
For and
:
where , the sequence converges quartically to , giving about 100 digits in three steps and over a trillion digits after 20 steps. The Gauss–Legendre algorithm (with
time complexity
In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...
, using Harvey–Hoeven multiplication algorithm) is asymptotically faster than the Chudnovsky algorithm (with time complexity ) – but which of these algorithms is faster in practice for "small enough" depends on technological factors such as memory sizes and access times. For breaking world records, the iterative algorithms are used less commonly than the Chudnovsky algorithm since they are memory-intensive.
The first one million digits of and are available from
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
. A former calculation record (December 2002) by Yasumasa Kanada of Tokyo University stood at 1.24 trillion digits, which were computed in September 2002 on a 64-node
Hitachi
() is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo G ...
supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...
with 1 terabyte of main memory, which carries out 2 trillion operations per second, nearly twice as many as the computer used for the previous record (206 billion digits). The following Machin-like formulae were used for this:
: ( Kikuo Takano (1982))
: ( F. C. M. Størmer (1896)).
These approximations have so many digits that they are no longer of any practical use, except for testing new supercomputers. Properties like the potential normality of will always depend on the infinite string of digits on the end, not on any finite computation.
Miscellaneous approximations
Historically, base 60 was used for calculations. In this base, can be approximated to eight (decimal) significant figures with the number 3;8,29,44, which is
:
(The next
sexagesimal
Sexagesimal, also known as base 60 or sexagenary, is a numeral system with sixty as its base. It originated with the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC, was passed down to the ancient Babylonians, and is still used—in a modified form ...
digit is 0, causing truncation here to yield a relatively good approximation.)
In addition, the following expressions can be used to estimate :
* accurate to three digits:
::
* accurate to three digits:
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:
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...
conjectured that
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
knew this expression, that he believed it to be exactly , and that this is responsible for some of Plato's confidence in the omnicompetence of mathematical geometry—and Plato's repeated discussion of special right triangles that are either isosceles or halves of equilateral triangles.
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* accurate to four digits:
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* accurate to four digits (or five significant figures):
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* an approximation by Ramanujan, accurate to 4 digits (or five significant figures):
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* accurate to five digits:
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* accurate to six digits:
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* accurate to seven digits:
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:: - inverse of first term of Ramanujan series.
* accurate to eight digits:
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*accurate to nine digits:
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: This is from Ramanujan, who claimed the Goddess of Namagiri appeared to him in a dream and told him the true value of .
* accurate to ten digits:
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