Celebrating Pi Day, Google employee Emma Haruka Iwao used cloud computing service to calculate pi to the greatest number of digits. Saying the value of an irrational and transcendental number is quite a popular thing to do on Pi Day. With this feat, Emma became the third woman to enter the Guinness World Record for calculating Pi up to large numbers. She broke the world record for pi set by Peter Trueb in 2016, which was 22.4 trillion digits long.
Emma spent four months working on the project in which she calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits. She works as a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google's office in Osaka, Japan. She took 25 Google Cloud virtual machines and 170 terabytes of data to complete the calculation for the record. Her calculation required, says Google in their blog on her achievement. She first downloaded the software to calculate Pi at the age of 12 on her home computer. She told CNN that it was her childhood dream to create such a record. Pi Day 2019: Know All About the Day As Math Jokes and Funny Memes Flood Internet.
Watch her inspirational journey on creating the Guinness Record here:
Talking about her journey, she says, "When I was a kid, I didn't have access to supercomputers. But even if you don't work for Google, you can apply for various scholarships and programs to access computing resources. I was very fortunate that there were Japanese world record holders that I could relate to. I'm really happy to be one of the few women in computer science holding the record, and I hope I can show more people who want to work in the industry what's possible."
Congratulations Emma Haruka Iwao!
31.4 trillion: the number of π digits calculated.
Congratulations to @Yuryu, who set the new world record, calculating almost 9 trillion more digits than the previous world record using Compute Engine VM clusters → https://t.co/j9Hwh4r1YL #PiDay pic.twitter.com/OzwYaXCjYL
— Google Cloud Platform (@GCPcloud) March 14, 2019
Pi is the number you get when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter. As its value is 3.14, Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day format). Pi is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration - because its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders. Pi is an irrational and transcendental number and it continues infinitely without repetition or pattern. For normal calculations, only a few digits are used. Pi is used in engineering, space exploration and physics as its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 14, 2019 10:10 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).