Can anyone on this mailing list confirm something for me? I had been arguing the
benefits of decimals and metric over fractions and imperial measurements with someone
on another website and Pi was mentioned.
I realised that mathematicians over the years have tries to solve Pi by feeding
millions of decimal numbers into computers but to no avail.
Then he mentioned Liebnitz who, apparently, according to him, had solved Pi using
fractions in the 1670's.
What I would like to know is, is this actual fact or just another misleading piece of
propaganda put about by the anti-metric brigade?
The equation he mentioned is below:
he riddle had of course been solved by Leibnitz in the 1670s with a continuous series
of fractions:
Pi = 4 * (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - 1/15 + 1/17 - 1/19 etc...)
or expressed in C to 2^24 this code is amazingly accurate.
int x = 0;for (int i = 1; i < 16777216; i++) { x += 1/((4*i)-3); x -=
1/((4*i)-1); }int pi = 4 * $x;cout pi;
