Anonymous

# How do you evaluate the BBP formula?

Go on wikipedia for the BBP formula. I just need to know how to put in a number, and evaluate for the answer. This isn't for a class in school, I am curious and really want to know. Please explain in the most simple terms you know how. Thanks!

Update:

Thanks for the answer. However, I don't really understand all this complex math. I am in ninth grade honors algebra 2. Iam really really good at math, but I haven't learned any of this complicated stuff yet. I did learn sigma notation though. Anyway, is there any way you could yourself type out an example for me? Find the tenth digit of pi or something like that using the BBP algorithm. If you could do such a thing, I would definitely make you best answer. Please? : )

Relevance

The BBP formula is a series to calculate the number pi. Each term added makes the sum approximate pi a little bit better.

There are a lot of formulas that do just that, but in the BBP formula each term has a factor 1/16^k which means that a term can be used to extract the k-th *hexadecimal* digit.

There is a workable algorithm here:

http://en.literateprograms.org/Pi_with_the_BBP_for...

To see a simple exemple on how these kind of algorithm work, take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spigot_algorithm