Ludolph van Ceulen

Ludolph van Ceulen was a German-born mathematician, born in Hildesheim on 28 January 1540 and settled in the Netherlands, where he died in Leiden on 31 December 1610. Of modest means, he had only an elementary education and could read neither Latin nor Greek, so friends translated important texts for him. He earned his living teaching mathematics and fencing, first in Delft and from 1594 in Leiden. He is remembered for computing pi by Archimedes' method with regular polygons of ever more sides, publishing 20 decimal places in his book Vanden circkel in 1596 and reaching 35 places, a value once called the Ludolphine number in Germany. In 1600 he was appointed to the engineering school at Leiden University, where Willebrord Snell was his best-known student. The digits of pi were engraved on his tombstone in the Pieterskerk.