How to compute digits of pi ?
Symbolic Computation software such as Maple or Mathematica can compute 10,000 digits of pi in a blink, and another 20,000-1,000,000 digits overnight (range depends on hardware platform). It is possible to retrieve 1.25+ million digits of pi via anonymous ftp from the site wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the files pi.doc.Z and pi.dat.Z which reside in subdirectory doc/misc/pi. New York’s Chudnovsky brothers have computed 2 billion digits of pi on a homebrew computer. The current record is held by Yasumasa Kanada and Daisuke Takahashi from the University of Tokyo with 51 billion digits of pi (51,539,600,000 decimal digits to be precise). Nick Johnson-Hill has an interesting page of pi trivia at: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/ nickjh/Pi.htm This computations were made by Yasumasa Kanada, at the University of Tokyo. There are essentially 3 different methods to calculate pi to many decimals. • One of the oldest is to use the power series expansion of atan(x) = x – x^3/3 + x^5/5 – … together wi
