Pi to how many decimal places??

There is a way of representing Pi as a continuous power series... It is one of the ways how they found it's value to begin with.. I'll find out.. for you.. A McLaurans series.. I can't remember of the top of my head..

One of the most impressive feats of maths achieved in the last 3 years was a forumlea for calculating the digits of Pi starting for any k digits in - without having to calculate the first 1..k-1 digits!

So this formulea could give you digits 2 billion to 3 billion without calculating the first 2 billion digits - very impressive stuff!

From memory its a series of reciporicals of about 8 high powers being added or subtracted.

Here is a very interesting formula for pi, discovered by David Bailey, Peter Borwein, and Simon Plouffe in 1995:


Pi = SUMk=0 to infinity 16-k [ 4/(8k+1) - 2/(8k+4) - 1/(8k+5) - 1/(8k+6) ].

The reason this pi formula is so interesting is because it can be used to calculate the N-th digit of Pi (in base 16) without having to calculate all of the previous digits!

Sometime in high school, I memorized it to 35 decimal places and still know it.

MMMMM PIE

I think memorizing 53 words of a romantic poem would be more useful, especially since you will never need any number to that precision, but you never can tell when a romantic poem will come in handy. I'd be more impressed if you could calculate pi. You can find several good ways to do it with paper and pencil on the internet. One series that yields pi is

pi = 4* (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 ...)

thats the one! clever little number.. that and the explanentials..