To print out this mind-boggling number, you would have to fill around 17.5 billion A4 sheets of paper on both sides. The invention of the computer was a game changer, with the advent of electronic mainframe computers at the end of the 1940s extending Pi to 2,037 digits.Īt the end of the 1980s, the Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky brothers developed an algorithm for calculating the digits of pi – which Rölke and his team also employed to hit 62,831,853,071,796 decimal places on their supercomputer. According to Rölke, there have been mathematicians and physicists who have spent a whole lifetime calculating the odd hundred or so decimal places of pi. “This is the unique and fascinating thing.” Which is why scholars have been studying pi for some 3,600 years already – from the ancient Egyptians to the Greek mathematicians Archimedes and Ptolemy from China’s Liu Hui to Iran’s Jamshid al-Kashi and Germany’s Leibniz. Every decimal place must be calculated individually. Pi is a number that never settles into a repeating pattern, says Rölke. In other words, pi is comprised of an infinite number of decimal places. But it doesn’t end there, because pi is what mathematicians call a transcendental number. You may even recall its first few digits: 3.1415. We use pi to calculate the size of any circle, large or small. It is the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. Π, spelled out as “pi” and named after the 16 th letter of the Greek alphabet, is a number many of us remember from school.
“We talked a bit about pi.” A fascinating number “The funniest bit was speaking live on South African radio,” he says.
CALCULATE PI PROFESSIONAL
From prestigious newspapers, to major television channels and professional journals – everyone wanted to report on the world record. However, media inquiries came flooding in not only from within Switzerland but from all over the world. Rölke, who heads the recently established Centre for Data Analysis, Visualisation and Simulation in Chur, admits he was hoping the record attempt would generate a certain amount of PR. According to the professor, reaction to the new world record has been “overwhelming”.
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