How much exactly is pi

Archimedes then found a way to double the number of sides of his hexagons. He did this four times until he was using 96 sided polygons. Around years after Archimedes, the Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi used a similar method to inscribe a regular polygon with 12, sides. It was nearly more years until a totally new method was devised that improved upon this approximation. The only catch is that each formula requires you to do something an infinite number of times. If you continued this pattern forever you would be able to calculate exactly and then just multiply it by 4 in order to get..

That part is key, because calculating pi has become a way for computers to flex their computational abilities, as programmers look toward extremely resource-intensive tasks, like modeling the universe or even making high-performance imagined worlds in video games.

Scientists can also use powerful supercomputers for practical tasks like mapping the human genome , or crunching all of the world's known chemical compounds in order to find candidates for new medicines. So calculating pi itself, Keller says, is a fun and attention-grabbing side effect of supercomputing, rather than a specific goal.

Setting the record is cool, but that's all it is. And in this case, the record came at a much faster speed—good news for the supercomputer. How do we calculate pi, anyway? Well, this team and the last several groups to break the world record have used a special formula called the Chudnovsky algorithm , developed in But all the algorithms to solve for pi are working off a hypothetical version of a very real problem.

Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. In theory, if you can draw and measure a perfect circle, you can calculate pi by simply dividing one value by the other. In reality, we must have complicated formulae to get the right individual digits that calculate out to as many decimal places as possible. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Read more from this special report: The Pi Day of the Century.

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. In basic mathematics, pi is used to find the area and circumference of a circle. Pi is used to find area by multiplying the radius squared times pi. Because circles are naturally occurring in nature , and are often used in other mathematical equations, pi is all around us and is constantly being used.

Pi has even trickled into the literary world. Pilish is a dialect of English in which the numbers of letters in successive words follow the digits of pi. Now I fall, a tired suburbian in liquid under the trees, Drifting alongside forests simmering red in the twilight over Europe. Now has 3 letters, I has 1 letter, fall has 4 letters, a has 1 letter, and so on, and so forth.