> First, the Fermat page at the St. Andrew MacTutor website
> (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/) gives August 17, not 20, as the
> day of birth. If this isn't just a typo, where did it come from? (It
> could be interesting to trace a genealogy of inaccuracies, to watch
> who pulls information off MacTutor, who gets it from DSB, etc.)
I noticed an example when I had to review the book
Pi: Algorithmen, Computer, Arithmetik (Springer 1998)
by Joerg Arndt and Christoph Haenel for the Math. Semesterberichte.
At that time, the MacTutor website told the story about Landau,
Bieberbach and Teichm"uller in connection with the definition of pi;
Bieberbach was called an eminent number theorist and a colleague
of Landau in Goettingen, and this formulation made it into the book.
This has meanwhile been corrected, but the characterization of Bieberbach
as an "eminent number theorist" can still be found on several
"history of pi"-pages:
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http://www.camberwell5.demon.co.uk/pi.htm
"Bieberbach, an otherwise great Number Theorist"
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http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/HistTopics/Pi_through_the_ages.html
"Bieberbach, an eminent number theorist"
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franz
P.S. I'm using MacTutor myself and find it immensely useful.