Excerpt
People have been figuring ways to compute π for ages, and most of them were very very tedious and time-consuming. Archimedes figured it out to 3 decimal places. 750 years later, we managed to get 4 digits. Another 900 years passed, and we got to 16. In the late 1800s, hapless William Shanks busted his buns for 15 years to compute π to 707 places using John Machin's formula (seen in the app, above). In a stroke of bad luck, however, he blew it 527 digits in, so the remainder of the estimate is incorrect. [Nooooooo...!] Fortunately, no one was willing to spend the time to double-check his work, and he died in the blissful happiness of a job well-done.