3.1415926535897932384626… in the Sk

Data-crunchers, eat your heart out. If you thought you could show off your calculating charms by rattling off the value of pi at a party to 20, 30… decimal points, Swiss researchers at the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences have got it pi-ed down to 62.8 trillion figures – that’s 62,800,000,000,000 numbers. No, the pi pipers were not using their cellphone calculators but a supercomputer powered by two 32-core AMD Epyc 7542 processors.

Not the kind of calculator you use to do your tax returns. Gentle readers, your school maths understanding of pi – or π, if all this is not Greek to you – may be 22/7, but that fraction, as any friendly nerd will tell you, is only an approximation of what is actually the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

It amounts to an irrational never-ending number. The last record of approaching pi’s exactitude was cornering its value to 50 trillion figures in 2020.


This latest count goes 12.8 trillion farther in 108 days and 9 hours – 3.5 times faster. So, for a jugaadi mind the question may arise: So? Well, the latest numbercrunching prowess can have future applications in RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics, textual analysis… essentially in finding patterns, very quickly. Meanwhile, we await the confirmation of this latest result. Our sympathies to whoever is checking the ‘answer’.