Once upon a time, I had an office mate who knew very much about pi and the calculation thereof. He read Contact. He was unhappy with the glaring mistake of generating pi one digit at a time. He wrote a testy message to Carl Sagan, explaining that a man of Carl's stature in the community should know better and do better. (For the non-mathematical, the well known algorithms for generating pi do so by doubling the number of calculated digits each itteration.)
Carl, bless his soul, returned to star stuff.
My office mate thereafter figured out an algorithm that, you guessed it, generates pi one digit at a time...
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syntheid
Re: BEWARE: MINOR SPOILER
Date: 2006-05-15 03:31 am (UTC)Once upon a time, I had an office mate who knew very much about pi and the calculation thereof. He read Contact. He was unhappy with the glaring mistake of generating pi one digit at a time. He wrote a testy message to Carl Sagan, explaining that a man of Carl's stature in the community should know better and do better. (For the non-mathematical, the well known algorithms for generating pi do so by doubling the number of calculated digits each itteration.)
Carl, bless his soul, returned to star stuff.
My office mate thereafter figured out an algorithm that, you guessed it, generates pi one digit at a time...