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World Pi Calculation Record Shattered by 123 Billion Digits

by Caleb Johnson on January 7, 2010 at 06:50 PM

Take a seat, math geeks. According to the BBC News, a scientist has calculated pi, that mathematical constant you might remember from high school, to more digits than ever in the history of time. Fabrice Bellard broke the previous record, which was set last August at 2.6 trillion digits by Daisuke Takahashi, by about 123 billion digits for a grand total of 2.7 trillion digits. What's even more impressive is that Bellard used a desktop PC that's much less powerful and expensive than the supercomputer used to set the previous mark. Think of him as the one-man 'Hoosiers' of pi-computing.

Bellard worked for 131 days to create the complex algorithm he used to calculate pi (20 times more efficient than the competition, he claims), and to check his record-setting results (which take up more than 1 terabyte of storage space). What would be a deathly boring painstaking task for us was simply a labor of love for Bellard. "I got my first book about pi when I was 14," he told the BBC.

When we were 14 years old, we spent the better parts of our days avoiding books about math. So, sure, you could say that Bellard's achievement is just a result of years of practice. But we've been shooting free throws every day since we were 14, and we're still getting picked last at the dang Y. [From: BBC News, via: Download Squad]

Tags: math, numbers, pc, personal computer, PersonalComputer, record, science, terabyte, top

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