Mathematician William Shanks spent 15 years calculating the value of pi to 707 places…but he made a mistake on the 528th digit.

Luckily, this discovery was made over 60 years after his death – Shanks would not have been pleased to know that he’d accidentally written a 5 instead of a 4 – which threw off the next 179 calculations!
Pi is an irrational number that describes the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It has an infinite number of digits, but that doesn’t stop mathematicians from calculating it to as many places as they can.
Thankfully, now that we’re calculating pi to trillions of places, we have advanced computers to help, so no more careless human errors!

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