Tech & Science Whoa. Pi has been calculated out to 31.4 trillion decimals, Google announces on Pi Day

A new world record has been set for calculating the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

On Thursday, Google revealed developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao, with the help of the tech giant's cloud platform, calculated Pi to 31.4 trillion decimal places, beating the previous record by nearly 9 trillion digits.

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To do this, Iwao's team used a program called ycruncher capable of computing Pi to trillions of digits powered by 25 virtual machines run through Google Cloud's Compute Engine.

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Google SMASHES world record on ' Pi Day ': First 31 . 4 trillion digits of the mathematical constant are calculated - but the task took 121 days and 2,795 hours of computer power to complete. A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating Pi to the highest number of digits - at 31 trillion .

Iwao and a Google team computed pi to 31 . 4 trillion decimal places or pi multiplied by 10 to the 13th power, ousting the previous record set in 2016 of 22. 4 trillion digits. Iwao's effort marked another first by relying on cloud technology, which had never been used for such a massive pi calculation .

"The biggest challenge with pi is that it requires a lot of storage and memory to calculate," said Iwao, who has worked with the company for nearly four years, in a blog posted published Thursday by Google.

The calculation required 170 terabytes of data, about the same amount of data as the entire Library of Congress print collection, said Google.

After about 4 months of calculating, Iwao arrived at the record-breaking result.

"The world of math and sciences is full of records just waiting to be broken," wrote Iwao in a separate Google post. "We had a great time calculating 31.4 trillion π digits, and look forward to sinking our teeth into other great challenges."

31.4 trillion: the number of π digits calculated.

Congratulations to @Yuryu, who set the new world record, calculating almost 9 trillion more digits than the previous world record using Compute Engine VM clusters → https://t.co/j9Hwh4r1YL #PiDay pic.twitter.com/OzwYaXCjYL

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It has computed Pi to 31 . 4 trillion decimal places – 31,415,926,535,897 digits after the decimal , to be precise. Not just that, this achievement has also broken During these four months, Google did not turn off its cloud server, even for once, to let it finish calculating . Pi Day was first celebrated in 1988

KAZINFORM Pi , the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, has been calculated out to 31 . 4 trillion digits and one of Google 's employees has "It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi ," Iwao told CNN Business. She has been working on it since she was 12

— Google Cloud Platform (@GCPcloud) March 14, 2019

Pictures: Fun facts about Pi

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1/16 SLIDES © Geri Lavrov/Getty Images

Pi Day is celebrated every year at 1.59 a.m. on March 14 because these are its first few digits - 3.14159.

2/16 SLIDES © Robert MacAusland/Getty Images

The symbol for pi is taken from the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet - π. The transliteration of the Greek letter – p – is the 16th letter of the English alphabet.

3/16 SLIDES © Yagi Studio/Getty images

Pi is a mathematical constant that refers to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It is also used to calculate a circle's area; the formula is πr squared.

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Scientists have known of pi for over 4,000 years. Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians calculated it as 3.1605 and 3.125, respectively.

Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (pictured) was the first to discover an accurate approximation. He knew his calculations were inexact, but he found the number as being between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71, or 3.1428 and 3.1408.

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Google computed Pi to 31 . 4 trillion digits, or Pi multiplied by 10 to the 13th power, breaking a world record. But the value of Pi , the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, has new meaning on this Pi Day . Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee, has broken the Guinness world record for

KAZINFORM Pi , the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, has been calculated out to 31 . 4 trillion digits and one of Google 's employees has "It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi ," Iwao told CNN Business. She has been working on it since she was 12

5/16 SLIDES © Science Source/Getty Images

The symbol – π – has been in use since the early 1700s; it was first used by Welsh mathematician William Jones. It was then made popular by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (pictured).

6/16 SLIDES © Gayle Laird/Exploratorium

The first celebration of pi happened in 1988; it was organized by American physicist Larry Shaw, who worked at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, U.S.

The Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco holds a circular parade each year on this day where the participants carry one of the digits in the number pi.

There is also a Pi Approximation Day – July 22 – which is celebrated as the day Archimedes discovered his approximation. As with Pi Day, the date was chosen to represent the mathematical value – 22/7.

7/16 SLIDES © Apic/Getty Images

Did you know Albert Einstein, one of the most brilliant scientists of all time, was born on Pi Day? He was born March 14, 1879. Of course, it wasn't called as such then!

English theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, also has a connection with Pi Day - he died on March 14, 2018.

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We have calculated 31 . 4 trillion digits of Pi on Google Cloud. That is the new world record in the Pi computation. The process took about four months and

Googler Emma has managed to calculate pi to its longest number of digits everCredit: Google . She managed to use Google Cloud's Compute Engine to calculate pi to 31 . 4 trillion figures – beating When I was a kid, I downloaded a program to calculate pi on my computer," Emma explained. Standard calculators can work out pi to a few digits, but significant calculations require enormous

8/16 SLIDES © Taylor Hinton/Getty Images

Since pi is irrational, its digits are immeasurable and go on forever in a random sequence. However, it can still be used to measure the area of a circle.

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The first million decimal places of pi comprise 99,959 zeros, 99,758 1s, 100,026 2s, 100,229 3s, 100,230 4s, 100,359 5s, 99,548 6s, 99,800 7s, 99,985 8s and 100,106 9s.

10/16 SLIDES © yuriz/Getty Images

The first attempt to calculate pi was called The Rhind Papyrus (c. 1650 B.C.). An Egyptian scribe named Ahmes wrote, "Cut off 1/9 of a diameter and construct a square upon the remainder; this has the same area as the circle." This meant that pi = 4(8/9)2 = 3.16049, a number close to the pi value.

11/16 SLIDES © ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Isaac Newton (pictured) is believed to have calculated pi to at least 16 decimal places.

Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) invented very effective ways of calculating pi, which later helped set up computer algorithms.

12/16 SLIDES © Carso80/Getty Images

Leonardo da Vinci’s attempted to solve the geometric problem of squaring a circle with the help of a drawing named Vitruvian Man. He could only come close to solving (but couldn’t solve) the problem due to the irrational nature of pi.

13/16 SLIDES © Shannon M. Lutman/Getty Images

Pi is also referred to as circular constant, Archimedes’ constant or Ludolph’s constant.

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At a website called The Pi-Search Page, one can search for any string of digits in the first 200 million digits of Pi.

Among the first 10 million decimal places of pi, the first six digits (314159) appear in order at least six times.

15/16 SLIDES © Sion Touhig/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images

Did you know that French luxury fashion and perfume house Givenchy named a men's cologne and aftershave after pi?

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Pi has a part in the “Star Trek” series. In one of the episodes – “Wolf in the Fold” – aired in 1967, Spock foils a malicious computer entity by instructing it to calculate pi to the last digit, a task that cannot be completed.

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