Science and Medicine : Pi Record Extended
Two mathematicians who set a record in June by calculating pi to 480 million decimal places announced last week that they have extended the mark to over 1 billion places. The work was done by Columbia University researchers Gregory and David Chudnovsky on two supercomputers at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
The new mark of 1,011,196,691 digits appears to be a world record, said an IBM spokesman.
Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The infinite string of digits begins with 3.14159 and contains no obvious pattern.
In June, Chudnovsky said calculating pi to such lengths is useful for testing the performance of computer hardware and software. He called the task “the ultimate stress test.” The calculations also let researchers investigate whether the string of digits is random or contains some undiscovered pattern, he said.
