Ramanujan's series for 1/π
Series de Ramanujan para 1/π
- Date
- 1914 · confidence high
- Place
- Madras (Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India
- Credited to
- Srinivasa Ramanujan
- People
- 👤 Srinivasa Avdula Ramanujan1887–1920
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Seventeen series for 1/π based on modular functions that converge extremely quickly, each term adding several decimal places. Seventy years later they underpinned the algorithms used to compute millions of digits of π.
The paper was published in 1914, already in Cambridge, but Ramanujan had developed much of this material in his notebooks in Madras (1904-1913).
What it led to
- Chudnovsky algorithm (1988)
- record computer calculations of π (Gosper, 1985)
- theory of modular functions