HOME HISTORY OF PI History of Pi Overview Egypt - The Rhind Papyrus Biblical - King Solomon's Temple Babylonia & Pi Ancient Greece - Archimedes & Pi Ancient China & Pi Hindu Mathematics & Pi Leibniz & Pi Isacc Newton and Pi Euler and Pi Ramanujan and Pi Ferguson & The Desktop Calculator Eniac - The First General Purpose Computer & Pi The Computer & Pi The Future DIGITS The Pi-O-Matic: Millions of Digits of Pi PARTY The Pi Day Party & Giant Pi Drop ACTIVITIES Buffon's Needle Buffon's Needle Interactive Demonstration Find Yourself in Pi Find Your Name, Birthday, or any text string in Pi The World Federation of Pi Pi Links               Pi History - Pi and the Computer The Illustrated History of Pi   Pi and the Computer         Following John Von Neumann's use of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, to compute 2037 digits of Pi in 1949, new records involving the computer calculation of thousands, and then millions of additional digits of pi were set - only to be broken again.       What made this possible was not simply greater computer horsepower, but better, faster, more advanced, and more elegant methods of computing pi - many of them based on ideas developed long ago, as if they were waiting for the advent of the computer.       As has already been noted, the early 20th century work by Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was the source of ideas that proved valuable more than half-a-century later when William Gosper undertook the then-record multi-million digit computed value of pi, and again when the Chudnovsky borthers Greg and David broke those records.       In the 1960's work with fast Fourier transforms (FFT's), algorithms which enable computers to perform rapid arithmetic on extremely large numbers, enabled even greater numbers of the digits of pi to be calculated.       In 1976 mathematician Eugene Salamin built an even more accurate and less computationally intensive method for computer calculation of pi - building on work and ideas set down centuries earlier by noted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855) and French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752 - 1833).         Some of the milestones in computer calculation of the digits of pi, following the first calculations by ENIAC and NORC:           1,000,000 digits (one million digits) 1973 computer calculation performed by Jean Guillord and Marine Bouyer (using a CDC7600 computer)           1,011,196,691 digits (one billion + digits) 1989 computer calculation performed by the brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky           1,073,740,000 1989 computer calculation performed by Yasumasa Kanada           2,160,000,000 1991 computer calculation performed by the brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky           3,221,200,000 1995 computer calculation performed by Yasumasa Kanada               next                                   History of Pi -Pi Day The Computer & Pi - Pi Day Illustrated History of Pi www.NationalPiDay.org National Pi Day