New Pi Record

A Japanese man has set a new world record by computing 5 trillion digits of pi.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70J7S220110120

Apparently Shigeru Kondo accomplished this feat using a home-built computer that worked non-stop for 90 days.  Apart from this dramatic triumph for mathematical hobbyists (Kondo is a systems analyst for a food company), the article contains the following two excellent lines:

“Calculating a more accurate pi, which is believed to go on forever, has been a challenge for scholars for thousands of years.”  Believed to go on forever?  Is the reporter some kind of mathematical agnostic?

And this, from Kondo himself:  “I really want to praise my computer, which calculated continuously for three months without complaint.”   Credit where credit is due, I suppose.

It is interesting to note that, while 5 trillion is indeed the new record for consecutive digits of pi, researchers at Yahoo were able to compute digits that are much farther out than that; they just don’t know all the digits that lead up to it!