DATE: Wednesday, January 12 (2011), at 12:50 - 1:40pm
PLACE: LIT 339 (The Atrium)
SPEAKER: Jon Borwein (University of Newcastle)
Jonathan M. Borwein, FRSC, FAAAS, FBAS FAA
Laureate Professor
and Director CARMA, University of Newcastle
ABSTRACT:
The desire to understand π, the
challenge, and originally the need, to calculate ever more accurate
values of π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its
diameter, has captured mathematicians --- great and less great ---
for many many centuries. And, especially recently, π has
provided compelling examples of computational mathematics.
Pi, uniquely in mathematics, is pervasive in popular culture and
the popular imagination. In this lecture I shall intersperse a
largely chronological account of π's mathematical and numerical
status with examples of its ubiquity.
The talk is lodged at
http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/pitalk.pdf
and the
accompanying paper [5] is at
http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/pi-2010.pdf.
REFERENCES
-
J.M. and P.B. Borwein, and D.A. Bailey,
Ramanujan, modular
equations and pi or how to compute a billion digits of pi,
MAA Monthly, 96 (1989), 201--219.
Reprinted in Organic
Mathematics,
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/organics, 1996, CMS/AMS Conf Proceedings,
20 (1997), ISSN: 0731-1036.
-
J.M. Borwein and P.B. Borwein, Ramanujan and Pi,
Scientific American, February 1988, 112--117. Also pp. 187-199
of Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys,Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A.
Rankin Eds., AMS-LMS History ofMathematics, vol. 22, 2001.
-
L. Berggren, J.M. Borwein and P.B. Borwein, Pi:
a Source Book, Springer-Verlag, (1997). Second Edition, (2000).
Third Edition, January 2004.
-
D.H. Bailey, and J.M. Borwein Mathematics by
Experiment: Plausible Reasoning in the 21st Century, AK Peters
Ltd, 2003, ISBN: 1-56881-136-5.
-
J.M. Borwein, Pi: from Archimedes to ENIAC and
beyond, in Mathematics and Culture, Einaudi, 2008.
Revised 2010 for Bergren Festschrift.
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