Google engineer sets world record by calculating pi to 31 trillion digits

A Japanese employee at Google broke the world record on Thursday for calculating pi to the furthest decimal, announcing that she had calculated the value to its 31.4 trillionth digit.

Emma Haruka Iwao used her company’s cloud computing service to undertake the calculation, according to a blog post on the site, which required 25 virtual machines to calculate 170 terabytes of data over 121 days to finish the task. Google’s blog post notes that the amount of data analyzed was similar to the size of the entire digitized print collection of the Library of Congress.

{mosads}”I feel very surprised,” Iwao told the BBC in an interview. “I am still trying to adjust to the reality. The world record has been really hard.”

“There is no end with pi, I would love to try with more digits,” she reportedly added.

The completion of Iwao’s calculation coincided with World Pi Day, the global unofficial recognition of pi, the numerical value found when dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. The value is thought to be infinitely long.

Iwao’s record Thursday broke the previous record of 22 trillion, set by Peter Trueb in 2017.

The BBC reports that it would take an average human more than 32,000 years to say the 31.4 trillion digits of pi calculated by Iwao.

“I was very fortunate that there were Japanese world record holders that I could relate to,” Iwao said in Google’s blog post.

“I’m really happy to be one of the few women in computer science holding the record, and I hope I can show more people who want to work in the industry what’s possible,” she added.