Daniel Shanks

After earning his PhD in mathematics, Shanks continued working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Naval Ship Research and Development Center at David Taylor Model Basin, where he stayed until 1976. He spent one year at the National Bureau of Standards before moving to the University of Maryland as an adjunct professor. He remained in Maryland for the rest of his life. Shanks died on September 6, 1996.

In 1974, Shanks and John Wrench did some of the first computer work on estimating the value of Brun's constant, the sum of the reciprocals of the twin primes, calculating it over the twin primes among the first two million primes.

Shanks's most prominent work in numerical analysis was a collaboration with John Wrench and others to compute the number π to 100,000 decimal digits on a computer. This was done in 1961 on an IBM 7090, and it was a major advancement over previous work.

Shanks was an editor of the Mathematics of Computation from 1959 until his death. He was noted for his very thorough reviews of papers, and for doing whatever was necessary to get the journal out.

Daniel Shanks (January 17, 1917 – September 6, 1996) was an American mathematician who worked primarily in numerical analysis and number theory. He was the first person to compute π to 100,000 decimal places.

Shanks was born on January 17, 1917, in Chicago, Illinois. He is not related to the English mathematician William Shanks, who was also known for his computation of π. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1937, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1954. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Shanks worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, first as a physicist and then as a mathematician. During this period he wrote his PhD thesis, which completed in 1949, despite having never taken any graduate math courses.