William Shanks, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

William Shanks

Amateur calculator, school owner

Date of Birth: 25-Jan-1812

Place of Birth: Durham, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 01-Jun-1882

Profession: mathematician

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

William Shanks (25 January 1812 – June 1882) was a British amateur mathematician. Shanks is famous for his calculation of p to 707 places, accomplished in 1873, which, however, was only correct up to the first 527 places.
This error was highlighted in 1944 by D.
F.
Ferguson (using a mechanical desk calculator).Shanks earned his living by owning a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring, which left him enough time to spend on his hobby of calculating mathematical constants.
His routine was as follows: he would calculate new digits all morning; and then he would spend all afternoon checking his morning's work.
To calculate p, Shanks used Machin's formula: p 4 = 4 arctan ? ( 1 5 ) - arctan ? ( 1 239 ) {\displaystyle {\frac {\pi }{4}}=4\arctan \left({\frac {1}{5}}\right)-\arctan \left({\frac {1}{239}}\right)} Shanks's approximation was the longest expansion of p until the advent of the digital electronic computer about one century later. Shanks also calculated e and the Euler–Mascheroni constant ? to many decimal places.
He published a table of primes up to 60 000 and found the natural logarithms of 2, 3, 5 and 10 to 137 places. Shanks died in Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham, England in June 1882, aged 70, and was buried at the local Hillside Cemetery on 17 June 1882.