Pi (π) is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous mathematical concepts in everyday life. For such a simple definition—the ratio of a circle’s circumference C to its diameter d—its concept has had such a profound impact in society that it’s practically indispensable at this point. Given its identity as a basic mathematical constant, it sits at the very top of most students’ easily-memorized numbers; however, it is also both non-repeating and non-terminating as a decimal. The fact that it’s irrational doesn’t help, either—you can’t just express pi as some fraction without sacrificing some accuracy on its value. Most people just settle for memorizing up to maybe two to five decimal places, 3.14156—but not the scientists over at the University of Applied Sciences in Graubünden, Switzerland. No, they wanted to go the extra mile: they calculated pi to 62.8 trillion digits.
At that point, it’s already a pretty hefty leap over the previous record-holders: 50 trillion digits, the current Guinness World Record by Timothy Mullican back in 2020; and 31.4 trillion, the record before that, set by Google back in 2019. The research team used a supercomputer, armed with two 32-core AMD CPUs, 1 TB (1 terabyte, ~1000 GB) of RAM, and 510 TB of storage capacity. The digits alone already took up 63 TB (~63,000 GB) With such a massive amount of numbers, the supercomputer crunched it for 108 days and nine hours before getting the result. According to the university’s Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation, they were already “almost twice as fast” as Google when they made their 2019 attempt, and “3.5 times as fast” as Mullican.
The team claimed that the demonstration was, in part, a stress test to see if their systems can handle huge amounts of numerical data, as they need it for their future calculations for other projects. The team also believes that calculating pi to such an extent can bring benefits to other areas of science that make use of computer modeling, such as fluid dynamics simulations and RNA analysis.
Finally, should your curiosity ask for it, the last ten digits are 7817924264—well, for now, anyway.
Bibliography
- AFP in Geneva. (2021, August 16). Swiss researchers calculate pi to new record of 62.8tn figures. The Guardian. Retrieved September 6, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/16/swiss-researchers-calculate-pi-to-new-record-of-628tn-figures
- Guinness World Records. (2020, January 29). Most accurate value of pi. Guinness World Records. Retrieved September 6, 2021, from https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/66179-most-accurate-value-of-pi
- Irving, M. (2021, August 17). Pi calculated to 62.8 trillion digits, setting new world record. New Atlas. Retrieved September 6, 2021, from https://newatlas.com/science/pi-world-record-62-8-trillion-digits/
- Kelly, H. (2019, March 14). A Google employee just broke the world record for calculating pi. CNN Business. Retrieved September 6, 2021, from https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/14/tech/pi-day-record-google/index.html
