But Ramanujan’s series — bizarre and arbitrary as they might appear — had an important feature: they took far fewer terms to compute π to a given accuracy. In 1977, Bill Gosper — himself a rather Ramanujan-like figure, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for more than 35 years — took the last of Ramanujan’s series from the list above, and used it to compute a record number of digits of π. There soon followed other computations, all based directly on Ramanujan’s idea — as is the method we use for computing π in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language.