4 ms·

Does this formula imply that we can find any nth decimal value of pi, even as it tends to infinity?

• version_five 4y ago
  You can find any (decimal) digit, but the amount of computation required gets larger for higher digits (I'm not sure of the actual scaling) - and the parent comment is saying that the paper's author says it would actually be faster to compute the intermediate digits than to use his formula for a specific digit. The BBP formula represents pi directly as a sum of increasing powers of 1/16, and provides a given hex digit in constant time. Such a formula has not been found for decimal digits
  • SamReidHughes 4y ago
    The nth hex digit takes O(n log n) time. But it doesn’t use much space.
    • version_five 4y ago
      Right, thanks, I was thinking too simply about it