Xref: utzoo comp.compression:194 sci.math:16337 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!linus!linus!faron!bs From: bs@faron.mitre.org (Robert D. Silverman) Newsgroups: comp.compression,sci.math Subject: Re: Program for Calculating PI Message-ID: <1991Apr3.014832.15021@linus.mitre.org> Date: 3 Apr 91 01:48:32 GMT References: Sender: news@linus.mitre.org (News Service) Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA 01730 Lines: 35 Nntp-Posting-Host: faron.mitre.org In article avenger@wpi.WPI.EDU (Samuel Joseph Pullara) writes: >Could someone please send me a program that will calculate PI to any >arbitrary number of digits? Thanks in advance... Let me add my opinion. Please do NOT comply with the above request. If the poster wants a large number of digits [of pi], over 1 billion have already been calculated. If the poster wants to know HOW it is done, he would be better off studying the actual mathematics than by reading some computer program. He might even then [God forbid!] learn something by writing his own program. I fail to see what the poster hopes to accomplish by having someone else hand him a black box program to compute something that has already been done many times. All the poster would do is waste CPU time on some machine repeating those calculations, while learning NOTHING in the process. On the other hand, if the user wants to know about HOW the Chudnovskys did the calculation (using an analytic continuation of a formula of Ramanujan), I'll be GLAD to provide that information. Or if he wants to know how D. Bailey (et. al.) used the arithmetic-geometric mean along with FFT multiply routines to calculate Pi to many places, I'll be happy to provide that as well. The above request sounds suspiciously like a homework assignment to me. -- Bob Silverman #include Mitre Corporation, Bedford, MA 01730 "You can lead a horse's ass to knowledge, but you can't make him think"