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Sounds like a remarkable guy. But, and not to nitpick, but calling him "the greatest mathematician of his era" is a bit ridiculous. This was the era of Hilbert, von Neumann, Gödel, Turing, Einstein, Ramanujan...
Yeah, the mainstream will probably never get the distinction between mathematics and arithmetics straight.
"Aitken could recite Pi to 707 decimal places", and how about 22.514? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z22H89rIMHk @ 8:00 (although the entire documentary is great)
When people say recite Pi is there some calculation involved or are they just memorising a large string of numbers?