After 108 days and 9 hours of working with a supercomputer, a team of Swiss experts has set a new world record for the precision of the number Pi.
Pi is a constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. (Photo: Igor Sokalski)
On August 16, Swiss researchers announced that they used a supercomputer to calculate the mathematical constant Pi with a level of precision sufficient to establish a new world record. “The computation process lasted 108 days and 9 hours,” reported the University of Applied Sciences Graubuenden.
This calculation was nearly twice as fast as the record set by Google using cloud computing in 2019, and 3.5 times faster than the previous world record set in 2020, according to the Data Analysis, Imaging, and Simulation Center at the University of Applied Sciences Graubuenden. The research team is awaiting confirmation of their new achievement from the Guinness World Records. Until then, they have only revealed the last 10 digits of Pi that they calculated, which are 7817924264.
The Swiss team calculated 62.8 trillion digits of Pi, while the previous world record was 50 trillion. They stated that the experience gained from the process of calculating Pi could be applied in other fields such as RNA analysis, fluid dynamics simulation, and text analysis.
Pi represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter with an infinite number of digits after the decimal point. The first 10 digits of this constant are 3.141592653. To date, scientists around the world continue to calculate further digits using powerful supercomputers.
