5 ms·

Alexander Aitken, the Human Computer

• thinkpad20 12y ago
  Sounds like a remarkable guy. But, and not to nitpick, but calling him "the greatest mathematician of his era" is a bit ridiculous. This was the era of Hilbert, von Neumann, Gödel, Turing, Einstein, Ramanujan...
  • 3rd3 12y ago
    Yeah, the mainstream will probably never get the distinction between mathematics and arithmetics straight.
• Medox 12y ago
  "Aitken could recite Pi to 707 decimal places", and how about 22.514? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z22H89rIMHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z22H89rIMHk @ 8:00 (although the entire documentary is great)
  • Tycho 12y ago
    When people say recite Pi is there some calculation involved or are they just memorising a large string of numbers?