# Name of mathematician who made an error, which made his later work useless?

In school, many years ago, my teacher taught me about a mathematician who was working on developing tables (or something similar to that). He apparently worked for years and then made a single mistake in his calculations. Consequently, the remaining work he did on these tables, which spanned additional years, was inaccurate. I tried looking him up recently but can't find any information in a general search of the internet. Does anyone know who this mathematician was?

• This sounds like the computation of $\pi$ by William Shanks to $707$ places, but there was a mistake that resulted in only the first $527$ being correct. That nevertheless was the record number of digits at the time. See the Chronology of computation of $\pi$ for more details. Actually several previous attempts turned out to be similarly flawed. – hardmath Sep 9 '17 at 23:01
• I wonder where that Wikipedia page's figure "Took 15 years to calculate" comes from - it's not in the cited "The Quest for Pi" article – Dap Sep 9 '17 at 23:04
• @Dap: His St. Andrews biography has some surrounding details, esp. concerning his collaboration with William Rutherford. – hardmath Sep 9 '17 at 23:13
• I hope that neither your teacher nor you are planning to use this story to scoff: Shanks's error in calculating the decimal expansion of $\pi$ led to more errors in the same calculation. It did not make all his later mathematical work useless. – Rob Arthan Sep 9 '17 at 23:14