Let’s give you a slight refresher course in basic mathematics. Do you remember pi? For those who don’t remember pi is basically the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. And just in case you had forgotten the more commonly known value of pi is 3.14. What perhaps you didn’t know is that pi is an irrational number which means that there’s no end to how many of its digits can be calculated.

However, a Googler today has broken the world record of calculating the “most accurate value of pi” ever. To be precise, the Googler calculated it to 31,415,926,535,897 digits. To simplify it this is upto a whopping 31.4 trillion digits.

As per a blog post by Google, when Emma Haruka was 12 years old, she became fascinated with pi. The blog quotes her, “Pi seems simple—it starts with 3.14. When I was a kid, I downloaded a program to calculate pi on my computer,” she says. “At the time, the world record holders were Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi, who are Japanese, so it was really relatable for me growing up in Japan.”

Incidentally, Takahashi was one of her professors in college later and helped her with some technical strategies. But how did she create a world record? Haruka used an application called y-cruncher on 25 Google Cloud virtual machines. The blog further quotes her saying, “The biggest challenge with pi is that it requires a lot of storage and memory to calculate.” Her calculation actually required 170TB of data and during that whole time, the Google Cloud infrastructure kept the servers going. The blog notes. “If there’d been any failures or interruptions, it would’ve disrupted the calculation. When Emma checked to see if her end result was correct, she felt relieved when the number checked out.”

Haruka’s achievement also helped her to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Source: gadgetsnow.com