Bihar cop in league of top mathematicians

An ADG-rank IPS officer of Bihar Amrik Singh Nimbran has joined the select league of world's top mathematicians with his new formulae for computing the value of `pi' having been uploaded on http://www.machination.eclipse.co.uk.

The website is jointly edited by well-known maths wizards Michael Roby Wetherfield of the UK and Prof Hwang Chien-lih of National Taiwan University, Taipei.

A collection of identities for computing the value of `pi', discovered by Nimbran during 2007-08, were sent to the two mathematicians on June 1, 2009. Four of these made their way to the website on June 7, 2009. In a subsequent e-mail to Nimbran, Wetherfield acknowledged that "stimulated by your (Nimbran's) results, I generated new identities myself within a week".

Nimbran came up with two more formulae this month. These two too Wetherfield and Chien-lih uploaded on their website. "I am surprised by your super ability about finding new excellent identities!" Chien-lih wrote to Nimbran in a congratulatory mail.

`Pi' is a mysterious number that denotes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. In general parlance, its value is taken as 22/7 which is just an approximation. Mathematicians across the world have been fascinated by this number and research has been going on to find a better approximation. Therefore, any formula which gives a better value of the `pi' in the shortest possible time is welcome in the mathematical world.

The Bihar cop has been engaged in mathematical research actively for over a decade and some of his research papers have been published in reputed journals brought out by Bihar Mathematical Society, Indian Mathematical Society and National Council of Educational Research and Training. His papers were also sent to the journals of London Mathematical Society and Fib Quarterly of The Fibonacci Association (USA) which commented favourably on the works of Nimbran.

A BA with economics and maths as optionals, Nimbran was the first non-mathematician to give an elementary proof of Fermat's last theorem for a cube in which he had proved that no integral cube number can be broken into two integral cube numbers. Prof K C Prasad of Ranchi University and Prof Emeritus Tej Narain Sinha of Bhagalpur University, who are regarded as the authority on Tarry-Escott problem (on numbers), expressed surprise on seeing Nimbran's proof.

"I was inspired by reading the works of great Indian mathematician S Ramanujan," Nimbran told TOI. He said he evaluates the value of `pi' through different approaches using Inverse Tangent Function which was first used by John Machin in 1706 and has since been used till date to find the value of `pi'.

"Now there are only three leading authorities on `pi' in the world --Wetherfield, Lih and Jorg Arndt of Australian National University," Nimbran said. He was modest enough not to include his name in the league.