A new Pi number calculation record set in Switzerland

A new Pi number calculation record set in Switzerland

The Graubünden University of Applied Sciences has set a new record for calculating the number Pi with 62.8 trillion (62.8 trillion) decimal places. This is 12.8 trillion more than the previous record.

It took 108 days and nine hours for a high-performance computer to calculate Pi with 62.800 billion decimal places, the HES Graubünden reported on Monday. The last ten known digits of Pi are "7817924264", affirms the HES which indicates that it will reveal the complete number only once the record approved by the Guinness Book.

The HES Graubünden thus beats the record set in January 2020 by the American Timothy Mullican with 50,000 billion decimal places : it took 303 days to achieve this result.

The previous record belonged to the Japanese computer scientist and mathematician Emma Haruka Iwao, working for Google, who had calculated Pi with 31,415 billion decimal places in 2018. The computer used by the HES performed its calculation almost twice as fast as Google and 3.5 times faster than Timothy Mullican.

The first decimal places of π (Pi)

The first decimal places of π (Pi) - [images.math.cnrs.fr]

No practical use

"Knowing Pi with tens of trillions of decimal places is of no practical use," admits the HES. The interest lies in the way to be able to calculate this sequence, which requires good hardware and a certain expertise to configure the computer and make it work for weeks without interference.

 The team that calculated the calculations is led by IT project manager at the HES Thomas Keller and head of the Data Analytics, Visualization and Simulation (DAViS) center Heiko Rölke. DAViS 'knowledge and materials are in high demand in application areas such as RNA analysis and flow simulations, emphasizes the HES.

3,14 etc.

π (Pi), sometimes called Archimedes' constant, is the number by which we must multiply the diameter of a circle to obtain its circumference and it is impossible to know the exact value because the number of digits after the decimal point is infinite.

If the diameter of the circle is 1, its circumference is π (Pi).

Animation par John Reid &Arpad Hovath, CC BY-SA 3.0

But the knowledge of Pi is constantly being refined thanks to the arrival of powerful computers. In 1988, the mathematician brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky developed this algorithm to calculate the number Pi:

David and Gregory Chudnovsky's algorithm for calculating the number Pi. [FH Graubünden]

The number Pi is an irrational and transcendent number: this means that the number Pi can be represented neither as a fraction (irrational) nor as a polynomial (transcendent). In addition, it has no periodicity: no sequence of digits is repeated.

However, even if enthusiasts struggle to remember hundreds or thousands of digits after the comma, the general public generally sticks to 3.1415927 at best.

For those who would like to memorize more, here is a link for the first millionth decimal places of Pi.