Pi, on the other hand, is an example of an irrational number, in which there are no repeating patterns. A number like 1/7 needs infinitely many decimals to write down - 0.1428571428571… - but the numbers repeat themselves every six places, making it easy to understand. The concept of pi is simple enough for a primary school student to grasp, yet its digits are notoriously difficult to calculate. What use, then, are the other 62.79 trillion digits? While the short answer is that they are not scientifically useful at all, mathematicians and computer scientists will be eagerly awaiting the details of this gargantuan computation for a variety of reasons. And with only 65 decimal places, we would know the size of the observable universe to within a Planck length – the shortest possible measurable distance. With 32 decimal places, we could calculate the circumference of our Milky Way galaxy to the precision of the width of a hydrogen atom. With only these ten decimal places, we could calculate the circumference of Earth to a precision of less than a millimetre. The mathematical constant pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and is approximately 3.1415926536. The researchers’ feat of arithmetic took 108 days and 9 hours to complete, and dwarfs the previous record of 50 trillion figures set in January 2020. By my estimate, if these digits were printed out they would fill every book in the British Library ten times over. Swiss researchers at the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden this week claimed a new world record for calculating the number of digits of pi – a staggering 62.8 trillion figures.
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