There was an episode of Star Trek where Spock detrmined that the ship's
computer had been compromised, owing to it making the same fatal error while
playing 3-dimensional chess. Spock regains control of the computer by having
it compute the value of pi to the last significant digit.
>
>Marnie read it and liked it. I leafed through it. Despite Marnie's
>efforts to have me be more rounded, am too much of a square peg to read
>that. The edges are a bit nicked and perhaps even a bit of dry rot has
>set in, but no other changes.
>
>Mandatory read for this special day (to those interested) is the article
>that appeared in the New Yorker, "The Mountains of Pi" by Richard Preston.
>It is a fascinating tale of the Chudnovsky brothers' quest to calculate
>and explore Pi to trillions of digits.
>They are a combination of number theorists and computer scientists. The
>Leibniz series has been known for hundreds of years and it is wondrous
>but mysterious how a simple series of rational numbers can converge on a
>simple ratio from a circle.
>They did not use that algorithm at all as it exhibits nonlinear convergence
>and is very inefficient even with conversion acceleration transformation
>techniques. They developed an algorithm named after them ( that can be
>coded in just a few lines that ferociously converges on pi, providing
>accurate digits swiftly.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chudnovsky_algorithm
>
>http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-of-pi
>
>I would also assign viewing the low budget film "Pi" from 1998--made
>for <70K. Marnie and I saw it in Cambridge when it was released. I bet
>one could stream it from somewhere for very little.
>Very off beat and a bit disturbing, and I recall liking it more than
>Marnie.
>
>As I do have a teaching appointment and a Professorship , I feel free
>giving out homework. ;-)
>
Pi-eyed Chris
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