1812-1882

English mathematician who calculated extraordinarily precise values of π, e, and Euler's constant, g. Shanks's calculations of π, carried out manually to 707 decimal places, were unfortunately found to be correct for only the first 527 decimal places. Similarly, a minor mistake in his calculations of e resulted in verification of only the first 528 places. Shanks also published a table of primes up to the number 60,000 and calculated the natural logarithms of several numbers to more than 130 decimal places.