Just in time for National Pi Day, a Google employee has set a world record for calculating the world’s favorite irrational number. Emma Haruka Iwao reportedly spent four months calculating pi from Google’s office in Osaka, Japan and was finally able to calculate the number to a whopping 31.4 trillion digits, according to CNN Business.
Iwao works as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud and used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to complete her project.
Her record was certified by Guinness World Records on Wednesday and officially announced by Google on Thursday, March 14 (3/14) which is appropriately National Pi Day.
“It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi,” Iwao said of her accomplishment. “We keep investing in the cloud and it gets even better over time. Hopefully, we can do an even bigger computation in the future.”
Iwao received help from y-cruncher, a Pi-benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee, using a Google Compute Engine virtual machine cluster.
The previous record was 22.4 trillion set by Peter Trueb in 2016.
If you were wondering, the last 97 digits of the result were “6394399712 5311093276 9814355656 1840037499 3573460992 1433955296 8972122477 1577728930 8427323262 4739940.” And for those who want to see all 31,415,926,535,897 digits of the pi calculation, you can download the complete report from Google Cloud.
As for how Iwao can celebrate her big moment, let’s hope that she does what the rest of the world should be doing to celebrate the glorious holiday: eat some actual pie.
