Pi now known to 31.4 trillion digits

Alert. The value of p has been computed by some programmer working at Google to a new record of 31.4 trillion digits. Don’t worry, the number of known digits has been gradually creeping up for years. The algorithms are well established. But you need some computing power and memory to get to 31+ trillion.

It took 112 days of computation time (with a 96 node computer). If you typed them out, say at 10 digits per inch, you would be typing a distance of 52 million miles, or 1835 times around the Earth. Or about 99 round-trips to the moon.

(https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-31-4-trillion-digits-of-archimedes-constant-on-google-cloud)

p is one of those numbers most numerous among all numbers called transcendental. This means it's not rational (like a fraction) and it's not algebraic (like square roots or any roots and combinations). The first proof p was transcendental took over 100 pages in print. But now it can be proved to undergrads, having some background, of course. p figures prominently in the history of mathematics. Archimedes was the first to derive a method to compute it, but his method would take millennia on even the fastest computers.

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