Google Employee Emma Haruka Iwao Breaks Pi Day Record

She spent four months working on the project.

pi day
Emma Haruka Iwao broke the Pi Day record. (Google)

Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee at their Osaka, Japan, office, has broken the world record for calculating pi- and she did it just in time for Pi Day.

Iwao spent four months working on calculating pi to 31.4 trillion digits.

The way you calculate pi is by dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter to get an irrational number that goes on for infinity, without repeating.

The Google employee works on the Google Cloud so it was perfectly fitting for her to use 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to get her to her record-breaking number. She is the third woman to set a record for calculating pi.

Iwao has had this goal in mind since she was kid. “It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi,” she told CNN Business.

If you wanted to download the 31,415,926,535,897 digits of her calculation, you can, and she hopes that as the cloud gets better over time “hopefully we can do an even bigger computation in the future.”

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