How do scientists go about calculating pi to umpteen decimal places?
Dear Cecil: I read recently that two supercomputer manufacturers were in a contest to determine who could calculate pi to the most digits. My simple question, simple for you at least, is, what data do they input to begin these calculations? Every schoolchild knows that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Obviously mathematicians do not draw a circle and then measure out the circumference with increasingly tiny rulers. But what do they do instead? — Maxwell Stephens, Washington, D.C. Dear Maxwell: Dreaming up “algorithms” (techie talk for “methods”) to compute pi has occupied the world’s great minds for more than two millennia. Clearly these aren’t guys you’d want to go on a long fishing trip with. The ancient Greeks used a simple method: You draw polygons (e.g., hexagons) around a circle with a diameter of one–one hexagon inside the circle, one out. Calculate the perimeter of the polygons (which is pretty straightforward), take an average, and you get a rough
