Donald Knuth does one of these lighthearted lectures every year, and this one was perhaps more fun and interesting than before: Pi and the Art of Computer Programming. A reminder: Knuth is like the grand master of algorithms, and I have all of his books on my shelves behind me, and used them when I wrote my own book on algorithms. […]
READ MOREI came across this remarkable image a couple of days ago. It shows four million digits of π encoded as colored pixels, with one pixel per digit. Each digit has a slightly different color. […]
READ MOREWith the September 2009 article, I decided to present a discussion of how the constant π (pi) was calculated in antiquity and over the ages, together with a layman’s rehash of an article I’d written a while ago on how to write a program to calculate it. The nice thing about writing code to calculate π is that it shows off Machin’s formula and writing a minimal “big number” library to perform the calculation. […]
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