A Pamphlet on Pi serving as a Supplement for the Third Edition of Pi: A Source Book

Our aim in preparing this pamphlet is to bring the material in the collection of papers in the second edition of our Pi: A Source Book [9] up to date. Moreover, several delightful pieces came available and are added. This substantial supplement to the third addition serves as a stand alone exposition of the recent history of the computation of digits of Pi. It also includes a discussion of the thorny old question of normality of the distribution of the digits. Additional material of historical and cultural interest is included, the most notable being new translations of the two Latin pieces of Viète (Translation of Article 9 (Excerpt 1): Various Responses on Mathematical Matters: Book VII (1593) and (Excerpt 2): Defense for the New Cyclometry or “Anti-Axe”), and a thorough revision of the translation of Huygens’s piece (Article 12) published in the second edition. We should like to thank Prof. Marinus Taisbak of Copenhagen for grappling with Viète’s idiosyncratic style to produce the new translations of his work. We should like to thank Karen Aardal for permission to use her photograph of Ludolph’s new tombstone in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, the Smithsonian for permission to reproduce a fine photo of ENIAC, and David and Gregory Chudnovsky for providing a “Walk on the digits of pi.” We should also like to thank Irving Kaplansky for his gracious permission to include his “A song about pi”. Finally, our thanks go to our colleagues whose continued interest in pi has encouraged our publishers to produce this third edition, as well as for the comments and corrections to earlier editions that some of them have sent us. L. Berggren, J. Borwein, P. Borwein Simon Fraser University, June 2003