Pi calculated to more than a trillion places Associated Press TOKYO -- A team of researchers at a leading national university have set a world record by calculating the value of pi to 1.24 trillion places, one of the researchers said Friday. Professor Yasumasa Kanada and nine other researchers at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University calculated the value for pi with a Hitachi supercomputer over 400 hours in September, project team member Makoto Kudo said. The new calculation is more than six times the number of places in the record currently recognized by Guinness World Records -- 206.158 billion places -- which Kanada also helped calculate in 1999. Kanada's team spent five years designing the program used in the September experiment, Kudo said. The Hitachi supercomputer is capable of 2 trillion calculations per second, or twice as fast as the one used for the current Guinness record calculation. Pi, usually given as 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and has an infinite number of decimal places. Such an extremely precise calculation of the figure isn't necessary for any practical scientific use, but researchers say it contributes to improving scientific calculation methods. ---------------------------------- math geeks will love this!
In middle school, my "Number Sense" teacher had a poster of Pi out to 100 digits. I memorized the whole sequence by the end of the year. I still belt it out up to 23 places, nearly 15 years later.
Just take it as a sign about how MUNDANE that class was! Especially considering I spent the rest of my time (while not staring at the poster), programming games on my graphing calculator... ok, i was a nerd. you can pity me.
I guess Carl Sagan was wrong about pi. I figured there would be a message from aliens in there somewhere.
That's cool and all, but I wonder how much grant money went into this 5 year project which isn't practical for any scientific use? Not trying to minimize the coolness of this or anything, but it does seem kind of pointless other than Kanada telling his grandkids that he could cut pie into smaller pieces than anyone else in the history of man..
I would bet very little grant money went into this. Mathematics gets the least funding of all math and science research. Just for what it's worth. RM95, you are cracking me up. Hope you have calmed yourself enough to stay in your chair.
Pi is useless............ ive never used it.. xept in geometry and trig. and ive never used those two clases
Are we talking about the same Pi? The one that is one of the most significant natural ratios in mathematics? Sorry, but i was a Maths and Economics major.
I'll use this moment to illustrate how you can have different magnitudes of infinity. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 3 and 4 as illustrated by Pi. Call that Infinity3 just for the hell of it. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 4 and 5 just the same. Call that infinity4. It's very clear that Infinity4 has a higher magnitude than Infinity3 (the number 4 is larger than the number 3) . So it becomes pretty obvious that you can have different magnitudes of infinity. You can credit that to a man called Descarte. Someone else figured out that you can different values for nothing.
if "infinity3" and "infinity4" are just the number of values between 3&4 and 4&5 respectively, how is one greater than the other? The number of values between each group of digits, is equal. However, if "infinity3" = the summation of all values between 3&4 and "infinity4" = the summation of all values between 4&5, than your premise (or Descartes', as the case may be), appears to be true.
drapG. What you are saying is somewhat correct. But it's simpler than that. you know 4.14..... is larger than 3.14.......... Yet both are infinite.
I always thought of inifinity as a concept, rather than trying to consider it as a number, which has a specific magnitude. However the number 4.14...... isn't infinite is it? It has an infinite number of digits, but that isn't the same thing. Or not to my mind anyway. The comparison I always heard with magnitudes of infinity was positive and negative numbers. There are an infinite number of positive whole numbers (just keep counting forever). How many whole numbers are there in total (positive and negative)? Twice as many as the infinite number of positive numbers?
DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER!!!!!!! Jesus...I have a headache after reading the math mixed with metaphysics above.
