The book he wrote about his calculations begins: Shanks seems to have understood the borderline status of his project. Even then, however, grinding out 707 decimal places of pi was more of a stunt than a contribution to mathematical research. Pencil-and-paper computation was a skill more highly prized in the 19th century than it is today. Airy, William Whewell, Augustus De Morgan. These sponsors-some of whom were also listed as subscribers to his 1853 book-included prominent figures in British science and mathematics: George Stokes, George B. Although he was never a member, he apparently had no trouble persuading Fellows to submit manuscripts on his behalf. The available evidence suggests that Shanks was an amateur and a marginal figure in the mathematical community, but not a crank. The two men cross-checked their calculations of pi and published some of the results jointly. Rutherford remained a mentor and became a collaborator. I have not been able to learn anything about Shanks’s further education there is no mention of a university degree. Shanks was then a boy of 10 or 12, and he must have been one of Rutherford’s pupils. When Shanks published a small book on pi in 1853, he dedicated it to Rutherford, “from whom I received my earliest lessons in numbers.” It turns out that Rutherford taught at a school not far from Corsenside in the 1820s. It’s true that Shanks studied with Rutherford, but this was not the relationship of a graduate student with a thesis advisor. Some sources identify Shanks as a student of William Rutherford, a mathematician who taught at the Royal Military Academy and also dabbled in pi calculations. After his marriage he lived in Houghton-le-Spring, another small northeastern town, where he ran a boarding school. He came from Corsenside, a village in the northeast of England, near the Scottish border. It’s known that he was born in 1812, married in 1846, and died in 1882. I think I also know where a couple of his errors crept in, but there are more that remain unexplained.īiographical details about William Shanks are hard to come by. But by adapting some pencil-driven algorithms to run on silicon computers, I have gotten a glimpse of what the process might have been like for Shanks. I haven’t the stamina for that-or even the life expectancy. One way to answer these questions would be to buy several reams of paper, sharpen a dozen pencils, and try to retrace Shanks’s steps. Who was this prodigious human computer? What led him to undertake his quixotic adventures in arithmetic? How did he deal with the logistical challenges of the pi computation: the teetering columns of figures, the grueling bouts of multiplication and division? And what went wrong in the late stages of the work? I have long been curious about Shanks and his 707 digits. Shanks made a series of mistakes beginning around decimal place 530 that spoiled the rest of his work. Moreover, the laptop will give theĭigits. Anyone with a laptop can compute hundreds of digits of pi in microseconds. All his patient toil has been reduced to triviality. Seen from a 21st-century perspective, Shanks is a poignant figure.
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