Can we calculate 100 digits of π by hand? The William Shanks method.

you should celebrate tau day too on june 28

circles are defined by their radius! There are plenty of shapes that have constant diameters, but only one that has a constant radius (per dimension)

Why is William shaking?

It's becoming forgotten art - how to do it using pen and paper only. Soon, many won't be able to tell how to do it even. Everything turns to knowing "Do you know how the button works?" as they mock it in IT Crowd.
If you made that calculating a competition I'd love to take part. Everyone for tremselves, and whose the fastest? Many calculations repeat few times, and if you keep track of them, planning ahead, you can reuse them later, cutting down the time required.

On my time I have created a method to compute pi by hand using only integers. worked quite good.

The way Matt draws his 5's gives me a tiny stroke every time I see it 😅

Hi Ths for this video
May I suggest/ask to calculate the 3/4 first zeros of the Riemann z function?
Ths in advance

I thought it would be fun to run this through MS Excel, but it will only calculate out to 15 significant digits, with only the first 10 decimal places of pi being correct. So, this group was more accurate than Excel in an entire weekend!

Glad to see that a splinter team managed to modularize the calculations, dealing with them in groups of ten digits at a time. That's the correct way to handle large computations like these.

William shanks the goat

So, Shanks was working alone, and he got it right. Is he the Anti-Parker? That is, the most accurate person who ever lived??

Classic England to make it so that only the rich and connected are allowed to make "true" academic discoveries.

I could memorise the first hundred digits faster than that.

The subtitles on this are possibly the worst I've ever seen.

i always wanted to learn how square roots could be calculated by hand. My dad was taught it but we never covered it and around late 90s early 00s I couldn't find a method when searching internet, although I'm sure it existed somewhere in a text book. It's crazy how much has changed in regards to digitized content and its accessibility over the last 20 years.

At my college they did this on pi day. I think they got to like 50. I didn’t participate, but I looked in and just saw a bunch of people with white boards and a pile of dried markers and even more unopened ones. It was insane and they did it all in a day. From like 8am till midnight they computed. It was a bunch of math majors and math teachers. A solid 99% of all math nerds on campus were in that room.

"They"...

Is anyone aware of a general-purpose pencil and paper protocol for splitting vey large long division or other such component calculations into, say, groups of columns with a carry-in and carry out combining stage to optimally distribute human calculation workloads like this? Imagine the scaling potential! I'd love to see a computer vision hand-calculation verifier stage added to the end as well.

Like many in the comments for this channel I wonder what school could have been if I'd had a Matt Parker for a maths teacher!

Wow this is inspiring. It's weird: Thanks to poorly delivered math education, as a kid I would have never understood the joy in doing something like this, nor appreciated the delightful puzzle solving at play; breaking up the problem and marshalling a large cluster of such slow computers..

I used to think that pi was calculated by drawing a circle then measuring the circumference and radius then dividing them

How do I become a member of the team for next year?

of course someone brought an abacus lol

Adam is the archivist!! 😂😂

Me who know the 100 digits of pi song: ermmm w h a t

I just love those automated subtitles: "we have the reciprocals of crimes"...

pour no graphic etc. tourture

There truly is something magical about old, British libraries.

Why.
So boring.

So what did we learn today? Computers are superior.

this is so painful...

I just noticed that you use "they" pronouns for people. That's awesome.

Want to collaborate?
I'm also doing this project.

14381051 in base10…
I HAVE CALCULATED PI

Am I the only one who is massively upset, ashamed even, at the disrespect and lack of attention for pi in the choice of 30 people for the calculation?

How did you ensure that the humans had only pure thoughts on the right side of the line?

I got up to 4 by hand in middle school using this method, and later figured out how to approximate the square root of two a and got up to 5 digits. I didn't pay attention in math classes but learned how to do long division fast xd

I gotta say I really respect the default use of they/them pronouns when referring to people in third person, as someone who does not align with their assigned gender it’s very appreciated in general

would love go to the royal society one day, it looks really interesting!

Brilliant. Excellent watch.

Those USA clowns still wearing masks lmao

That’s an amazing organizational feat.

Are you allowed to manufacture calculating devices past the calculation barrier?

Does memorising 100 digits of pi then using your hands to count each digit, count as working it out with your hands? I can tell you any of the first 100 digits with this method 😝. It was easier than memorising the periodic table of elements but not as much fun or satisfying.