Math Drudge

Using his company’s distributed computing facilities, Tsz-Wo Sze, a Yahoo! researcher, has computed a sequence of binary digits of pi beginning at the two quadrillionth binary digit of pi. This computation used Bellard’s variant of the original “BBP” formula for pi, which formula was discovered in 1996 by a computer program running the “PSLQ” integer relation algorithm.

A New Scientist article describing this computation is available here: New Scientist.

A paper written by Sze presenting the details of his computational methods and results is available here: Sze manuscript.

Additional background information on the history of pi and the BBP

Continue reading Yahoo! researcher computes binary digits of pi beginning at two quadrillionth digit

At the upcoming meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society, Prof. Jonathan Borwein will give a plenary talk on the mathematics of uniform random walks. This is in addition to the public lecture The Life of Pi.

Abstract:

Following Pearson in 1905, we study the expected distance of a two-dimensional walk in the plane with n unit steps in random directions — what Pearson called a random walk or a “ramble”. While the statistics and large n behaviour are well understood, the precise behaviour of the first few steps is quite remarkable and less tractable. Series evaluations and recursions are obtained

Continue reading Borwein to give talk on the mathematics of uniform random walks