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Happy Pi Day! Google's Emma Haruka Iwao breaks pi computation world record
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A man walks past the logo of Google during the VivaTech trade fair in Paris. (AFP/Alain Jocard)
I
n honor of Pi Day on Thursday, March 14, Google announced that the company's own Emma Haruka Iwao has surpassed the world record pi computation by nearly nine trillion digits.
In 2016, Peter Trueb set the world record for the greatest number of digits of pi ever calculated by generating 22.4 trillion digits. This year, however, after 121 days starting in September and ending in January, according to Alexander J. Yee, Google's Emma Haruka Iwao successfully passed the previous record by calculating 31.4 trillion digits of pi, more specifically and amusingly, 31,415,926,535,897 digits.
31.4 trillion: the number of π digits calculated.
Congratulations to @Yuryu, who set the new world record, calculating almost 9 trillion more digits than the previous world record using Compute Engine VM clusters → https://t.co/j9Hwh4r1YL #PiDay pic.twitter.com/OzwYaXCjYL
— Google Cloud Platform (@GCPcloud) March 14, 2019
This feat was accomplished using y-cruncher and the Chudnovsky formula, the same program and algorithm that allowed Trueb and various other mathematicians to compute the previous world record calculations.
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I'm on the news 🙋♀️/ BBC News - Woman breaks pi world record https://t.co/4S0w2h6vZT
— Emma Haruka Iwao (@Yuryu) March 14, 2019
The last 97 digits of the calculation are as follows and are completely unique to the rest of the trillions and trillions of digits in the computation:
6394399712 5311093276 9814355656 1840037499 3573460992
1433955296 8972122477 1577728930 8427323262 4739940
Naturally, not more than a few hundred digits are necessary for most applications but, as Google said, "That isn't stopping anyone." Calculating the digits of pi is a method of testing supercomputers, as well as a way for mathematicians simply to engage in some friendly competition.
