Alexander Aitken, the Human Computer

[kerny]

http://www.nzedge.com/alexander-aitken/

[Medox]

"Aitken could recite Pi to 707 decimal places", and how about 22.514? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z22H89rIMHk @ 8:00 (although the entire documentary is great)

[Tycho → Medox]

When people say recite Pi is there some calculation involved or are they just memorising a large string of numbers?

[thinkpad20]

Sounds like a remarkable guy. But, and not to nitpick, but calling him "the greatest mathematician of his era" is a bit ridiculous. This was the era of Hilbert, von Neumann, Gödel, Turing, Einstein, Ramanujan...

[3rd3 → thinkpad20]

Yeah, the mainstream will probably never get the distinction between mathematics and arithmetics straight.