A Google employee from Japan has broken the world record for the number of digits of pi calculated.
Emma Haruka Iwao, a cloud developer advocate at Google, calculated pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits (stop counting, its 31 trillion digits) thus breaking the previous record of 22,459,157,718,361 (9 trillion) digits set back in 2016.
Pi is the number we get when on dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter and most of us are familiar with the first few digits of the Pi (3.14…).
Iwao has been working in Google for over three years and the company announced her accomplishment on March 14 which happens to be the Pi day.
Achieving this feat required huge amounts of data processing. She used a program y-cruncher on the Google Compute Engine cluster which took nearly four months to process about 170 terabytes of data.
To put things into perspective 200,000 music tracks make up 1 terabyte. Here’s Iwao explaining how she calculated Pi here:
