A US computer storage company calculated the number Pi to have 105 trillion digits, breaking the previous world record.
NASA scientists use only Pi with 16 digits after the decimal point. Photo: NASA
On Pi Day, March 14th, Solidigm, a California-based American company, announced they had calculated Pi to 105 trillion decimal places, according to Live Science . The calculation took 75 days to complete and used one million gigabytes of data, setting a new record for calculating this infinite constant. Pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant equal to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi does not have an exact value, usually approximated as 3.14 for ease of calculation. Finding a longer version of Pi has long been a challenge for amateur and professional mathematicians and computer scientists, requiring computing power equivalent to hundreds of thousands of smartphones.
Finding the sequence of digits after the decimal point of Pi has no real impact on mathematics because calculations rarely require more than a few dozen digits. For example, NASA scientists only need the first 16 digits after the decimal point of Pi to perform most of their research on the universe. Instead, calculating the number to its most precise value has long been used as a standard for testing new computer programs and data storage systems.
For comparison, if you typed the new Pi number onto paper in a continuous line using a size 10 font, the number would be approximately 3.7 billion kilometers long, meaning it could stretch from Earth to somewhere between Uranus and Neptune. The calculation was performed using 36 proprietary hard drives (SSDs), storing a total of about one petabyte (one million gigabytes) of data. The processor also needed to perform the calculation with more powerful components to reduce the time. However, high-capacity and reliable storage drives were more important due to the need for enormous data throughput throughout the process.
According to Brian Beeler, owner of Solidigm, this is a major achievement. In April 2023, Solidigm calculated Pi with 100 trillion decimal places, a record previously set by Google Cloud in 2022. Prior to that, the record was 62.8 trillion decimal places, calculated over 108 days by a supercomputer at Grisons University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland in 2021. Using the human brain, the current world record for Pi with the most decimal places (70,000 digits) was set by Rajveer Meena at VIT University in India on March 21, 2015, according to the Guinness World Records.
An Khang (According to Live Science )
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