Pi Directory

David H. Bailey
Update: 8 July 2021


Press articles on pi, most recent listed last:

  1. Ivars Peterson, "Pick a digit, any digit," Science News Online, 28 Feb 1998, available at PDF.
  2. Charles Seife, "Randomly distributed slices of pi," Science, vol. 293, 3 Aug 2001, pg. 793, available at PDF.
  3. Ivars Peterson, "Pi a la mode," Science News, 1 Sep 2001, available at PDF.
  4. W. Wayt Gibbs, "A digital slice of pi: A new way to do pure math: Experimentally, Scientific American, May 2003, pg. 23, available at PDF
  5. Erica Klarreich, "Math Lab: Computer experiments are transforming mathematics," Science News, vol. 165, 24 Apr 2004, available at PDF
  6. June Kronholz, "If pious revelry gets you down, calculate the joys of pi day, Wall Street Journal, 15 Mar 2005, available at HTML.
  7. John Markoff, "14,159,265 new slices of rich technology," New York Times, 19 Aug 2005, available at HTML.
  8. Ivars Peterson, "Quilting pi," Science News, 6 May 2006, available at HTML.
  9. Erica Klarreich, "Springfield theory: mathematical references abound on The Simpsons," Science News, 10 Jun 2006, available at HTML.
    See also item #2 in the next section below for the fax mentioned in this article.
  10. Elizabeth Landau, "On pi day, one number 'reeks of mystery'," CNN, 12 Mar 2010, available at HTML.
  11. Linda Vu, "Supercomputers crack sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-Squared," Dept. of Energy, 28 Apr 2011, available at HTML.
  12. David H. Bailey and Jonathan M. Borwein, "Are the digits of pi random?," Huffington Post, 16 Apr 2013, available at HTML.
  13. [no author], "Just in time for pi day," Newswise, 4 Mar 2014, available at HTML.

Other general-interest items related to pi:

  1. David Anderson's decimal pi search facility: HTML
  2. Fax to Bailey from "The Simpsons" TV show requesting digits of pi: PDF.
    Note: The 40,000th digit of pi was provided to the show by Bailey: HTML.
  3. Alexander Yee's pi site (describes his computer program for computing pi to 50 trillion digits, as of the above date): HTML
  4. Fortran-90 and C programs implementing the BBP pi algorithm: HTML.
  5. The University of Newcastle/CARMA "Walking on Numbers" site (random walk on the first 100 billion base-4 digits of pi): HTML
  6. LBNL "wonder" website: HTML

Technical papers on pi, most recent listed last:

  1. David H. Bailey, Peter B. Borwein and Simon Plouffe, "On the rapid computation of various polylogarithmic constants" (original paper of the BBP formula and algorithm), Mathematics of Computation, vol. 66, no. 218 (Apr 1997), pg. 903-913, available at PDF.
  2. David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Peter B. Borwein and Simon Plouffe, "The quest for pi," Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 19, no. 1 (Jan 1997), pg. 50-57, available at PDF.
  3. David H. Bailey, "The BBP algorithm for pi," manuscript, 17 Sep 2006, available at PDF.
  4. Jonathan Borwein, "The life of pi: From Archimedes to Eniac and beyond," manuscript, Mar 2010, available at PDF.
  5. David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Andrew Mattingly and Glenn Wightwick, "The computation of previously inaccessible digits of pi^2 and Catalan's constant," Notices of the American Mathematical Society, to appear, 11 Apr 2011, available at PDF.
  6. David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Cristian S. Calude, Michael J. Dinneen, Monica Dumitrescu and Alex Yee, "An empirical approach to the normality of pi," Experimental Mathematics, vol. 21 (2012), pg. 375-384, available at PDF.
  7. David H. Bailey and Jonathan M. Borwein, "Pi day is upon us again, and we still do not know if pi is normal," American Mathematical Monthly, March 2014, pg. 191-206, available at PDF.
  8. David H. Bailey, "A short history of pi formulas," manuscript, 8 Nov 2016, available at PDF.
  9. David H. Bailey, "A compendium of BBP-Type formulas for mathematical constants," manuscript, 15 Aug 2017, available at PDF.
  10. David H. Bailey, "A collection of mathematical formulas involving pi," manuscript, 6 Feb 2018, available at PDF.