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Ludolph van Ceulen (28 January 1540 in Hildesheim, Germany - 31 December 1610 in Leiden, The Netherlands) was a German mathematician who emigrated to the Netherlands. He was appointed the first professor of mathematics at the university of Leiden in 1600.
Ludolph van Ceulen spent a major part of his life calculating the numerical value of the mathematical constant &pi, using essentially the same methods as those employed by Archimedes some 1800 years earlier. He published a 20-decimal value in his 1596 book Van de Cirkel ('On the Circle'), later expanding this to 35 decimals. After his death, the 'Ludolphine number'
was engraved on his tombstone in Leiden. The tombstone was later lost, but has been restored in the year 2000.
Calculating π
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