Most of us won’t get much further than 3.14 from the bare head. But a German supercomputer went a step further.

There is no getting around it in mathematics: pi. The number that describes the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. Pi is often referred to simply as 3.14. But in reality, the number of decimal places goes on indefinitely.

New world record

And in recent years, researchers have made it a sport to formulate pi as accurately as possible. The last attempt dates back to January 2020; then American Timothy Mullican managed to calculate pi to 50 trillion decimal places. A world record! But that has now passed. German researchers have succeeded in formulating pi to just over 62 trillion decimal places.

108 days

Researchers of Fachhochschule Grisons took 108 days and 9 hours to calculate pi to the 62,831,853,071,750th decimal. That made them significantly faster than Mullican, who took eight months to get his 50 trillion decimal places in a row.

Target

Although it is of course nice to have a world record to your name, that was not the ultimate goal of the German researchers. Their calculations were actually intended to gain more insight into the functioning, capabilities and limitations of their supercomputer. “During the preparation and execution of the calculations, we have gathered a lot of knowledge and were able to optimize our processes,” says researcher Heiko Rölke. And that knowledge will come in handy if the supercomputer is used for other purposes in the future, such as data analysis and simulations.

Records follow each other in quick succession

The world record – which is still by the Guinness Book of World Records must be verified – is of course a nice bonus. Whether it will hold up for a long time is of course the question, because the records have followed each other quite quickly in recent years. In 2016, we knew ‘only’ 22 trillion decimal places. In 2019, 31.4 trillion decimal places were recorded. And in 2020 there were about 19 trillion more. And now another 12 trillion have been added.

Awaiting their recognition by the Guinness Book of World Records the German researchers have not yet released all of the more than 62 trillion decimal places. However, they have already revealed for the curious what the last ten digits are: 7817924264.