Pi (\u03c0) is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous mathematical concepts in everyday life. For such a simple definition\u2014the ratio of a circle\u2019s circumference C to its diameter d\u2014its concept has had such a profound impact in society that it\u2019s practically indispensable at this point. Given its identity as a basic mathematical constant, it sits at the very top of most students\u2019 easily-memorized numbers; however, it is also both non-repeating and non-terminating as a decimal. The fact that it\u2019s irrational doesn\u2019t help, either\u2014you can\u2019t 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\u2014but not the scientists over at the University of Applied Sciences in Graub\u00fcnden, Switzerland. No, they wanted to go the extra mile: they calculated pi to 62.8 trillion digits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At that point, it\u2019s 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\u2019s Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation, they were already \u201calmost twice as fast\u201d as Google when they made their 2019 attempt, and \u201c3.5 times as fast\u201d as Mullican.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, should your curiosity ask for it, the last ten digits are 7817924264\u2014well, for now, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n