Mathematician:Daniel Shanks

Mathematician

American mathematician who worked primarily in numerical analysis and number theory.

Best known as the first to compute $\pi$ to $100 \, 000$ decimal places.

Unrelated to William Shanks, who also calculated $\pi$ to a large number of places.

Nationality

American

History

• Born: January 17, 1917 in Chicago, Illinois
• Died: September 6, 1996 in Maryland

Theorems and Definitions

• Newman-Shanks-Williams Prime (with Morris Newman and Hugh Cowie Williams)
• Shanks Transformation
• Shanks' Square Forms Factorization
• Tonelli-Shanks Algorithm (with Alberto Tonelli)

Publications

• 1959: Khintchine's Constant (Amer. Math. Monthly Vol. 66, no. 5: pp. 276 – 279) (with John W. Wrench, Jr.)  www.jstor.org/stable/2309633

• 1962: Calculation of $\pi$ to 100,000 Decimals (Math. Comp. Vol. 16: pp. 76 – 99) (with John W. Wrench, Jr.)  www.jstor.org/stable/2003813

• 1962: Solved and Unsolved Problems in Number Theory

• 1974: Brun's Constant (Math. Comp. Vol. 28: pp. 293 – 299) (with John W. Wrench, Jr.)  www.jstor.org/stable/2005836

Notable Quotes

My tardiness in learning of these historical references [to Alberto Tonelli's work on factorization] was because I had lent Volume 1 of Dickson's History to a friend and it was never returned.

Sources

• 1986: David Wells: Curious and Interesting Numbers ... (previous) ... (next): $10$
• 1997: David Wells: Curious and Interesting Numbers (2nd ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): $10$