i am currently doing a little "math program" so i am researching. did you know:
The current record is held by Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi from the University of Tokyo with 51 billion digits of pi (51,539,600,000 decimal digits to be precise).
man! it sure gets complicated from here:
There are essentially 3 different methods to calculate pi to many decimals.
One of the oldest is to use the power series expansion of atan(x) = x - x^3/3 + x^5/5 - ... together with formulas like pi = 16*atan(1/5) - 4*atan(1/239). This gives about 1.4 decimals per term.
A second is to use formulas coming from Arithmetic-Geometric mean computations. A beautiful compendium of such formulas is given in the book pi and the AGM, (see references). They have the advantage of converging quadratically, i.e. you double the number of decimals per iteration. For instance, to obtain 1 000 000 decimals, around 20 iterations are sufficient. The disadvantage is that you need FFT type multiplication to get a reasonable speed, and this is not so easy to program.
A third one comes from the theory of complex multiplication of elliptic curves, and was discovered by S. Ramanujan. This gives a number of beautiful formulas, but the most useful was missed by Ramanujan and discovered by the Chudnovsky's. It is the following (slightly modified for ease of programming):
S = sum_(n = 0)^oo (-1)^n ((6n)!(k_2 + nk_1))/(n!^3(3n)!(8k_4k_5)^n)
The great advantages of this formula are that
1) It converges linearly, but very fast (more than 14 decimal digits per term).
2) The way it is written, all operations to compute S can be programmed very simply. This is why the constant 8k_4k_5 appearing in the denominator has been written this way instead of 262537412640768000. This is how the Chudnovsky's have computed several billion decimals.
An interesting new method was recently proposed by David Bailey, Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe. It can compute the Nth hexadecimal digit of Pi efficiently without the previous N-1 digits. The method is based on the formula:
in O(N) time and O(log N) space. (See references.)
The following 160 character C program, written by Dik T. Winter at CWI, computes pi to 800 decimal digits.
int a=10000,b,c=2800,d,e,f[2801],g;main(){for(;b-c;)f[b++]=a/5;
for(;d=0,g=c*2;c-=14,printf("%.4d",e+d/a),e=d%a)for(b=c;d+=f[b]*a,
f[b]=d%--g,d/=g--,--b;d*=b);}
So, if you've just broken the world record for generating digits of pi....
...how do you prove it?
Randall Twede
Ranch Hand
Joined: Oct 21, 2000
Posts: 4089
posted
0
good question
Randall Twede
Ranch Hand
Joined: Oct 21, 2000
Posts: 4089
posted
0
arg! how do i do factorials in java? here i am worried about e when i still haven't figured out pi
Randall Twede
Ranch Hand
Joined: Oct 21, 2000
Posts: 4089
posted
0
now i find out about Pascal's triangle....this is going to be fun
Dave Trower
Ranch Hand
Joined: Feb 12, 2003
Posts: 78
posted
1
I think you need to look at BigInteger and BigDecimal classes that are part of the java.math package. You will need these if you want to calculate e or pi to a large number of places.
I also think e is easier to calculate than pi based on what you listed here. It would be easy to write a function in java that returns a factorial.
If you like this type of thing, you should check out Project Euler at http://projecteuler.net/ Good luck.
Dave Trower wrote:If you like this type of thing, you should check out Project Euler at http://projecteuler.net/
Yes, Project Euler is fun if you like playing with math puzzles and programming. They have a long list of math puzzles which you're supposed to solve by writing small programs. Some of the puzzles are very simple, and some are quite hard. I've used them to learn functional programming in Scala. You can for example compute the Fibonacci sequence in a very nifty way.
project euler sound interesting right now. the first thing i did in this program was Fibonacci numbers. i agree calculating e will be easier. i almost have it just from thinking about it. the math for calculating pi looks much harder.
0
