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Mathematician - Wikipedia (693 words) |
 | A mathematician is a person whose area of study and research is mathematics. |
 | Mathematicians differ from philosophers in that the primary questions of mathematics are assumed (for the most part) to transcend the context of the human mind; the idea that "2+2=4 is a true statement" is assumed to exist without requiring a human mind to state the problem. |
 | Mathematicians differ from physical scientists such as physicists or engineers in that they do not typically perform experiments to confirm or deny their conclusions; and whereas every scientific theory is always assumed to be an approximation of truth, mathematical statements are an attempt at capturing truth. |
| Pi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (4651 words) |
 | The Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi computed π to be between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927 and gave two approximations of π, 355/113 and 22/7, in the 5th century. |
 | In 1789, the Slovene mathematician Jurij Vega improved John Machin's formula from 1706 and calculated the first 140 decimal places for π of which the first 126 were correct [1] and held the world record for 52 years until 1841, when William Rutherford calculated 208 decimal places of which the first 152 were correct. |
 | Shanks's son Oliver Shanks, also a mathematician, states that there is no family connection to William Shanks, and in fact, his family's roots are in Central Europe. |