A Slice of Pi: William Shanks Mystery Cache
A Slice of Pi: William Shanks
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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The above coordinates are bogus. Read below to find the correct coordinates. The actual cache location is approximately .5 mile from the posted location.
William Shanks was a nineteenth-century English schoolteacher and mathematician. He had an obsession with calculating digits of pi (and other irrational numbers), and spent much of his spare time for a large portion of his life doing the tedious calculations by hand. In 1853 he published his results containing far more digits of pi than were known to mankind up to that point.
The tragedy of his story is not that today's laptop computer can do that same calculation in under a second. It is rather that, nearly a century after his landmark publication, an electronic computer revealed that he had made an error, and from that point on, all his digits were wrong! Just imagine all the years of time wasted because all the results were faulty. Fortunately the poor guy never knew that.
Actual cache coordinates are:
N35° 33.ABC'
W82° 43.DEF'
ABC = the number of digits of pi published by William Shanks - 498; DEF = the number of digits that were correct - 167. Checksum: A + B + C + D + E + F = GH and G + H = 2.
You're looking for a magnetic keyholder.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Tbbtyr!