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A Google Employee Just Broke The World Record For Calculating Pi

Posted at 6:32 AM, Mar 14, 2019
and last updated 2019-03-14 06:32:37-04

SAN FRANCISCO, Cali. (CNN Business)– A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating pi just in time for the mind-bogglingly long number’s special day.

Emma Haruka Iwao spent four months working on the project in which she calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits.

Pi holds a special place in the realm of math. It’s an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing a circle’s circumference by its diameter.

Iwao did her number crunching primarily from Google’s office in Osaka, Japan, where she works at as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud. Fittingly, she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to generate the enormously long number. It’s the first pi record calculated on the cloud.

Her milestone was certified by Guinness World Records on Wednesday, making her the third woman to set a world record for calculating the number. Iwao broke the record for pi set by Peter Trueb in 2016, which was 22.4 trillion digits long.

Google made the announcement March 14 (3.14), which is known as Pi Day.