1812 William Shanks - British mathematician who spent numerous years manually calculating the value of pi. Shanks kept a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring in a coal mining area near Durham. His calulation of pi reached 707 places by 1873, a feat unchallenged until the use of electronic computers. In 1944, Ferguson's new computation of pi showed Shanks had made a mistake in the 528th decimal place, invalidating the digits calculated beyond. By the end of the twentieth century, computers could easily extend the results to over 2 billion places What?????? 1890 US reporter Nellie Bly of the New York World returned home, completing an around-the-world journey in 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes. She had beaten the fictional 80-day trip of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg I still say it would have been fun to follow her adventure in the newspaper.
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