Google Engineer Calculates Pi to 31 Trillion Digits, Sets New World Record

Pedantic math whizzes may insist that Pi Day should really be called Pi Approximation Day. The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is commonly shortened to 3.14, but the sequence is actually infinite. Just in time for Pi Day on March 14 (3/14), a Google engineer has set a new record for the most pi digits ever calculated, Business Insider reports.

The previous record for the known digits of pi stood at 22.4 trillion digits. As Google announced on Pi Day 2019, Emma Haruka Iwao, a cloud developer advocate who's been with the company for three years, has added 9 million digits to that figure.

Working out of a lab in Osaka, Japan, she used Google's cloud-computing service to crunch 170 terabytes of data. For comparison, a single terabyte can hold 40 days worth of video. The process required 25 virtual machines running the y-cruncher program over four months.

According to Google, this marks the first time cloud computing has been used to calculate a record number of pi digits. Haruka Iwao has been working on cracking new pi sequences since she first downloaded software to calculate the number on her home computer at age 12. She's the third woman to break the pi record, and she's interested in discovering even more digits.

Anyone can download the full sequence onto their computer from Google. Memorizing all 31,415,926,535,897 digits may be impossible, but you can memorize at least the first 100 with this basic technique.