March 14 (3/14) is Pi Day, honoring the irrational mathematical constant that is, among other things, the ratio of a perfect circle's circumference to its diameter.
As a fun Pi Day stunt some eight months in the making, it was announced today that a Google employee used the cloud to calculate pi out to 31,415,926,535,897 digits, smashing the previous world record, and timing the announcement until today, Pi Day 2019. And yes, you read that number right: she calculated pi out to pi-times-ten-trillion decimal places. How 'bout that.
(Calculating pi out that far has no known real-world application other than bragging rights, of course. Even if you are calculating the circumference of the observable universe down to the precision of one atom, you'd only need pi at the precision of thirty-nine digits. Having over thirty trillion digits is a bit excessive.)
A fun bonus fact about pi: the reason the Greek letter π was adopted as the symbol for this number (instead of some other Greek letter) is because the Greek word for circumference, περιφέρεια (periphéreia, from which we obviously also get our word "periphery") starts with a π. Calculating a circle's circumference was, of course, the first known use for the number pi.
So, Happy Pi Day! Hope you have a good one! (Or should I say, hope you have a good 3.141!)
As a fun Pi Day stunt some eight months in the making, it was announced today that a Google employee used the cloud to calculate pi out to 31,415,926,535,897 digits, smashing the previous world record, and timing the announcement until today, Pi Day 2019. And yes, you read that number right: she calculated pi out to pi-times-ten-trillion decimal places. How 'bout that.
(Calculating pi out that far has no known real-world application other than bragging rights, of course. Even if you are calculating the circumference of the observable universe down to the precision of one atom, you'd only need pi at the precision of thirty-nine digits. Having over thirty trillion digits is a bit excessive.)
A fun bonus fact about pi: the reason the Greek letter π was adopted as the symbol for this number (instead of some other Greek letter) is because the Greek word for circumference, περιφέρεια (periphéreia, from which we obviously also get our word "periphery") starts with a π. Calculating a circle's circumference was, of course, the first known use for the number pi.
So, Happy Pi Day! Hope you have a good one! (Or should I say, hope you have a good 3.141!)
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