Appendix B

Extreme Digit-Hunting

I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried
these computations, having no other business at the time.
                                            ―Isaac Newton, after computing 15 digits of π in 1666

The Solutions to 10,002 digits

• Problem 1 · Problem 2 · Problem 3 (273 digits only) · Problem 4 · Problem 5 · Problem 6 · Problem 7 · Problem 8 · Problem 9 · Problem 10

The Code That Does It

• Problems 1–10 w/o Problem 3 (Mathematica) · Problem 3 (PARI/GP)

A Further Challenge

If you add together our heroic numbers the result is τ = 1.497258836… .
I wonder if anyone will ever compute the ten thousandth digit of this fundamental constant?
―Lloyd N. Trefethen at the end of his report in SIAM News July/August 2002

… that is, after all of our work, it remains to compute the solution of Problem 3 to at least 10,002 digits. Good luck.

This is a web page for the book:

Folkmar Bornemann, Dirk Laurie, Stan Wagon, Jörg Waldvogel: The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge, A Study in High-Accuracy Numerical Computing. Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Philadelphia, 2004.

last modified: 05/25/04 17:04 +0200 (FB)