A ‘pi’ Five For Google For Smashing the ‘π’ World Record

If you’re not applying for Maths, it may have passed you by that the 14^th March was the official Pi day! This year, Google had some incredible news to share, letting it be known that one of its employees Emma Haruka Iwao significantly increased the known numbers of Pi.

Pi is considered irrational because it cannot be expressed as an a/b fraction, where ‘a’ is an integer and ‘b’ is an integer that is not zero. With the help of the Google’s global computing cloud service and a huge a processing effort, Emma has now discovered 31,415,926,535,897 digits i.e. the Pi number of digits of Pi!

The amount of processing power required (the speed at which computer a can run mathematical equations) came to approximately 170 terabytes, which is around the same size as the entire internet in back in the early 2000s. Emma had been interested in Pi since a child, so the achievement is not only an incredible professional achievement, but also a personal one.

Applicants going for Mathematics or Computer Science would be wise to look more into the technical details of how Emma was able to so rapidly expand the known number of digits in Pi.