John Wrench was a pioneer in using computers for mathematical calculations, and is noted for work done with Daniel Shanks to calculate the mathematical constant pi to 100,000 decimal places.
11 Facts About John Wrench
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John Wrench received his PhD in mathematics in 1938 from Yale University.
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John Wrench's thesis was titled The derivation of arctangent relations.
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John Wrench died on February 27,2009, of pneumonia in Frederick, Maryland.
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John Wrench started his career teaching at George Washington University, but switched to doing research for the United States Navy during World War II.
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John Wrench's specialty for the Navy was developing high-speed computational methods, and he was a pioneer in using computers for mathematical calculations.
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John Wrench worked on projects involving underwater sound waves, underwater explosions, structural design, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, and data analysis.
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John Wrench became deputy head of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin in 1953, and retired in 1974 as the head of the laboratory.
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John Wrench had academic appointments at Yale University, Wesleyan University, University of Maryland, College Park, and American University.
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John Wrench was at one time the editor of the Journal of Mathematics of Computation.
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John Wrench was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council.