![]() ![]() It’s one of the few ways to measure how much progress we're making across centuries, including before the invention of electronic computers. OneHundredAndTen writes: Pi is now known to 62.8 trillion decimal digits. Today, we use computers to do this calculation, which helps us learn how much faster they’ve become. In the past, people would manually - meaning without calculators or computers - determine the digits of pi. Computer scientist Donald Knuth wrote "human progress in calculation has traditionally been measured by the number of decimal digits of π" in his book “The Art of Computer Programming” ( Dr. The well-known approximation 3.14 is believed to have been found by Archimedes around the year 250 BCE. Swiss researchers have calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8tn figures using a supercomputer. The results were in and it was a new record: We’d calculated the most digits of π ever - 100 trillion to be exact.Ĭalculating π - or finding as many digits of it as possible - is a project that mathematicians, scientists and engineers around the world have worked on for thousands of years, myself included. It was finally time - I was going to be the first and only person to ever see the number. A few months ago, on an average Tuesday morning in March, I sat down with my coffee to check on the program that had been running a calculation from my home office for 157 days. The 100-trillionth decimal place of π (pi) is 0.
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