How is pi solved

It was calculated by a Google employee over days using a freely available program called y-cruncher and verified with another 48 hours of number-crunching sessions. The calculation took up about as much storage space as the entire digital database of the Library of Congress. Emma Haruka Iwao, the woman behind the record, has been calculating pi on computers since she was a child. The previous record stood at over 22 trillion digits, worked out after days of computation on a Dell server, also using y-cruncher.

But maybe 31 trillion digits is just a bit of overkill. Heck, Isaac Newton knew that many digits years ago. So why would we ever need 31 trillion digits? But the more satisfying answer seems to me to have nothing to do with math.

Maybe it has to do with what President John F. Kennedy said about building a space program. If you want to calculate pi, first measure the circumference of a circle by wrapping a piece of string around the edge of it and then measuring the length of the string. Then, measure the diameter of the circle, which is the distance between one side and the other that runs through the center. Just divide the circumference by the diameter to calculate pi! To learn how to calculate pi using a limit or sine function, keep reading the article!

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Method 1. Make sure you are using a perfect circle. This method won't work with ellipses, ovals, or anything but a real circle. A circle is defined as all the points on a plane that are an equal distance from a single center point. The lids of jars are good household objects to use for this exercise. You should be able to calculate pi roughly because in order to get exact results of pi, you will need to have a very thin lead or whatever you are using. Even the sharpest pencil graphite could be huge to have exact results.

Measure the circumference of a circle as accurately as you can. The circumference is the length that goes around the entire edge of the circle.

Since the circumference is round, it can be difficult to measure that's why pi is so important. Lay a string over the circle as closely as you can. Mark the string off where it circles back around, and then measure the string length with a ruler.

Measure the diameter of the circle. The diameter runs from one side of the circle to the other through the circle's center point. Use the formula. Thus, pi equals a circle's circumference divided by its diameter.

Plug your numbers into a calculator: the result should be roughly 3. Repeat this process with several different circles, and then average the results. This will give you more accurate results. Your measurements might not be perfect on any given circle, but over time they should average out to a pretty accurate calculation of pi.

Method 2. Use the Gregory-Leibniz series. Mathematicians have found several different mathematical series that, if carried out infinitely, will accurately calculate pi to a great number of decimal places. Some of these are so complex they require supercomputers to process them. One of the simplest, however, is the Gregory-Leibniz series. The famous number has many practical uses, mathematicians say, but is it really worth the time and effort to work out its trillions of digits?

Swiss researchers have spent days calculating pi to a new record accuracy of Using a computer, their approximation beat the previous world record of 50tn decimal places, and was calculated 3. From ancient Babylonian times , humans have been trying to approximate the constant that begins 3. Jan de Gier, a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne, says being able to approximate pi with some precision is important because the mathematical constant has many different practical applications.

In maths, pi pops up everywhere.