Critical Acclaim for Pi and the AGM: "Fortunately we have the Borwein's beautiful book . . . explores in the first five chapters the glorious world so dear to Ramanujan . . . would be a marvelous text book for a graduate course."--Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society "What am I to say about this quilt of a book? One is reminded of Debussy who, on being asked by his harmony teacher to explain what rules he was following as he improvised at the piano, replied, "Mon plaisir." The authors are cultured mathematicians. They have selected what has amused and intrigued them in the hope that it will do the same for us. Frankly, I cannot think of a more provocative and generous recipe for writing a book . . . (it) is cleanly, even beautifully written, and attractively printed and composed. The book is unique. I cannot think of any other book in print which contains more than a smidgen of the material these authors have included.--SIAM Review "If this subject begins to sound more interesting than it did in the last newspaper article on 130 million digits of Pi, I have partly succeeded. To succeed completely I will have gotten you interested enough to read the delightful and important book by the Borweins."--American Mathematical Monthly "The authors are to be commended for their careful presentation of much of the content of Ramanujan's famous paper, 'Modular Equations and Approximations to Pi'. This material has not heretofore appeared in book form. However, more importantly, Ramanujan provided no proofs for many of the claims that he made, and so the authors provided many of the missing details . . . The Borweins, indeed have helped us find the right roads."--Mathematics of Computation

This book presents new research revealing the interplay between classical analysis and modern computation and complexity theory. Two intimately interwoven threads run through the text: the arithmetic-geometric mean (AGM) iteration of Gauss, Lagrange, and Legendre and the calculation of pi.

In the 4,000-year history of research into Pi, results have never been as prolific as present. This book describes, in easy-to-understand language, the latest and most fascinating findings of mathematicians and computer scientists in the field of Pi. Attention is focused on new methods of high-speed computation.

Students and researchers from all fields of mathematics are invited to read and treasure this special Proceedings. A conference was held 25 –29 September 2017 at Noah’s On the Beach, Newcastle, Australia, to commemorate the life and work of Jonathan M. Borwein, a mathematician extraordinaire whose untimely passing in August 2016 was a sorry loss to mathematics and to so many members of its community, a loss that continues to be keenly felt. A polymath, Jonathan Borwein ranks among the most wide ranging and influential mathematicians of the last 50 years, making significant contributions to an exceptional diversity of areas and substantially expanding the use of the computer as a tool of the research mathematician. The contributions in this commemorative volume probe Dr. Borwein's ongoing legacy in areas where he did some of his most outstanding work: Applied Analysis, Optimization and Convex Functions; Mathematics Education; Financial Mathematics; plus Number Theory, Special Functions and Pi, all tinged by the double prisms of Experimental Mathematics and Visualization, methodologies he championed.

Our intention in this collection is to provide, largely through original writings, an ex tended account of pi from the dawn of mathematical time to the present. The story of pi reflects the most seminal, the most serious, and sometimes the most whimsical aspects of mathematics. A surprising amount of the most important mathematics and a signifi cant number of the most important mathematicians have contributed to its unfolding directly or otherwise. Pi is one of the few mathematical concepts whose mention evokes a response of recog nition and interest in those not concerned professionally with the subject. It has been a part of human culture and the educated imagination for more than twenty-five hundred years. The computation of pi is virtually the only topic from the most ancient stratum of mathematics that is still of serious interest to modern mathematical research. To pursue this topic as it developed throughout the millennia is to follow a thread through the history of mathematics that winds through geometry, analysis and special functions, numerical analysis, algebra, and number theory. It offers a subject that provides mathe maticians with examples of many current mathematical techniques as weIl as a palpable sense of their historical development. Why a Source Book? Few books serve wider potential audiences than does a source book. To our knowledge, there is at present no easy access to the bulk of the material we have collected.

This book documents the history of pi from the dawn of mathematical time to the present. One of the beauties of the literature on pi is that it allows for the inclusion of very modern, yet accessible, mathematics. The articles on pi collected herein fall into various classes. First and foremost there is a selection from the mathematical and computational literature of four millennia. There is also a variety of historical studies on the cultural significance of the number. Additionally, there is a selection of pieces that are anecdotal, fanciful, or simply amusing. For this new edition, the authors have updated the original material while adding new material of historical and cultural interest. There is a substantial exposition of the recent history of the computation of digits of pi, a discussion of the normality of the distribution of the digits, and new translations of works by Viete and Huygen.