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Occu-π: The Strange History of Counting To Pi, 3.14159265301...

The latest calculation of _pi_ required a programmer, a hacked together 48-terabyte hard drive, a lot of hours and a very patient spouse. But humans have been crunching the number Pi since people were scrawling on papyrus.
The Chudnovsky Bros, from The New Yorker.

The latest calculation of pi required a programmer, a hacked together 48-terabyte hard drive, a lot of hours and a very patient spouse. But humans have been crunching the number pi since people were scrawling on papyrus. For those who haven’t thought about the the number pi since 9th grade geometry, don’t stress because plenty of people were thinking about it for you while you weren’t.

Pi, the mathematical constant that describes the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is usually rounded off to 3.14, but with a small caveat. It’s actually an irrational number that cannot be reduced to a fraction, which means it never ends and never repeats. The search to calculate the limit of this number that has no limit is a puzzle that has eluded mathematicians and scientists for thousands of years, but It’s latest digit was computed last Sunday when 56-year old Japanese man named Shigeru Kondo in Lide, Nagano Prefecture, calculated pi to 10 trillion digits, doubling his previous record of 5 trillion digits set in 2010.

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The discovery was made possible by software developed by Alexander Yee, a 23 year old who goes to Northwestern University, and a hardware setup that is nothing short of jawdropping. In order to process ten trillion digits worth of numbers, Kondo built a 48-terabyte hard drive in his own home. The computer setup is such a massive energy-sucker that is caused his house’s ambient temperature to soar to nearly 104 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Kondo’s wife Yukiko, who spoke with Japan Times, “We could dry the laundry immediately, but we had to pay 30,000 yen [$400] a month for electricity.”

Kondo’s discovery may be the latest addition to a long string of attempts to unravel the mystery of pi, but like trying to define the limits of the universe, the pi quest itself begs a larger issue.

Seriously: How do you calculate something that has a limit of infinity?

Maybe this is an example of the value of process, but history’s search to define pi has resulted in one of humanity’s most enduring and challenging puzzles — and potentially one of the most long-standing exercises of mathematical fortitude and calculated futility in human existence.

The concept of pi is paradoxical. Sure, it’s used to calculate the area of a circle, but its mathematical properties extend to seemingly every inch of our existence on the planet, and yet it remains something humans have little grasp of. In recent years, pi has been used to explain everything from DNA superstrings to music theory. Humanity’s fascination with this number that has no ‘solution’ has even sparked cultural phenomena such as Pi Day (March 14) and provided a numerical target for memorization tests. It’s seeming numerical randomness is witness to musical composition- Felix Jung converted the first 10,000 digits of pi into music using Flash animation and composer Las Erickson used pi to compose a damn orchestral symphony:

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Humanity’s obsession with pi is a long one. The most recent quest to unearth the true identity of pi is one more link in humanity’s long love affair with the irrational number, a love that even predates the famous Ancient Greek number romancer Archimedes. In honor of mathematics’ most dogged pursuit, I offer my own humble list of pi computations:

1650 BC: The first mention of pi goes back to ancient Egypt with a scribe named Ahmes who wrote, “Cut off 1/9 of a diameter and construct a square upon the remainder; this has the same area as the circle”, which roughly equates pi to 3.16. The Chinese apparently continued to equate pi to 3 for hundreds of years after this scroll was written.

287 BC: The first real breakthrough comes with Archimedes of Syracuse, who uses the difference between the perimeters of polygons to calculate a very accurate approximation of pi: the value 22/7.

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Circa 400 AD: Tsu Ch’ung-chih and his son Tsu Keng-chih of modern day China calculate pi as between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927 by using Archimedes’ method of polygon inscription. They used polygons with 24,576 sides.

Circa 800 AD: Arabian mathematician Mohammed ibn Musa al’Khwarizmi narrows pi down to either 3 1/7, the square root of 10 or 62,832/20,000.

16th Century: Amateur mathematician and lawyer, François Viète becomes the first to define pi as infinite.

1593: Adrianus Romanus uses circumscribed polygons to calculate pi to 17 digits after the decimal point. 15 were later proven correct.

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1596: Romanus calculates pi to 20 digits.

1610: Romanus calculates pi to 35 digits using polygons with 500 million sides. His accomplishments are so celebrated they carve the digits on his tombstone.

1706: John Machin, a professor of astronomy in London uses arc tangents to calculate pi up to 100 places. It was the most accurate formula to date.

1737: Leonhard Euler becomes the first to use the symbol π.

1873: Another Englishman, William Shanks, calculates pi to 707 digits, which later turned out to only be correct to 527 digits

1949: ENIAC, the world’s first electronic digital computer developed by Army Ordnance to compute World War II ballistic firing tables, computes 2037 digits of pi in just seventy hours. It took Shanks several years to calculate his 707.

1973: The one millionth digit of pi is calculated.

1976: Eugene Salamin develops an algorithm that doubles the number of accurate digits generated with each iteration.

1989: Canonized in a 1992 New Yorker article, Gregory Chudnovsky and his brother David calculate the one billionth digit of pi. Looking at the challenge of pi as philosophical undertaking, they were once quoted as saying “We are looking for the appearance of some rules that will distinguish the digits of pi from other numbers. If you see a Russian sentence that extends for a whole page, with hardly a comma, it is definitely Tolstoy. If someone gave you a million digits from somewhere in pi, could you tell it was from pi? We don’t really look for patterns; we look for rules.”

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1997: Yoshiaki Tamura and Dr. Yasumasa Kanada calculate 51.5 billion digits in just over 29 hours.

Digits of pi.

2009: The Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba uses its supercomputer T2K Tsukuba System to calculate pi to 2.6 trillion digits.

2010: Shigeru Kondo calculates_pi_to 5 trillion digits.

2011: Kondo and Yee set the new world record of calculating_pi_to its 10 trillionth digit, doubling their record set in 2010.

Kondo’s computer. Image via.

The search for_pi_will continue long after we’re all gone. Even after humanity ends, the decimals will continue to proliferate, until someone else chooses to take up the cause. Oh, and just in case you were wondering: the 10 trillionth digit of pi is 5.