![]() From "The quest for Pi" to be found with the Pi Talks
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Some of the people who compute Pi |
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Bailey, Kanada, Gosper ... |
-- spanning 4000 years of Pi's investigation.
The computation of Pi is virtually the only topic from the most ancient stratum of mathematics that is still of serious interest to modern mathematical research. And to pursue this topic as it developed throughout the millennia is to follow a thread through the history of mathematics that winds through geometry, analysis and special functions, numerical analysis, algebra and number theory. It offers a subject which provides mathematicians with examples of many current mathematical techniques as well as a palpable sense of their historical development." The above passage is taken from the introduction to "Pi : A Source Book" by L. Berggren, J. Borwein and P. Borwein. It is a large collection of papers on pi and will appear with Springer-Verlag sometime in mid 1997. Much additional material is available in the 1986 Wiley volume "Pi and the AGM" by J. Borwein and P. Borwein.
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SFU/CECM/~jborwein/. Last revised 24/4/97 by Jonathan
Borwein