March 14 (UPI) — Guinness World Records celebrated Pi Day on Monday by announcing Swiss researchers set a new record by calculating the number to 62,831,853,071,796 digits.
Pi Day is celebrated March 14 — 3.14, the first three digits of pi — as a means of celebrating the irrational number, which represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Guinness World Records said Thomas Keller and his team at the Center for Data Analytics, Visualization and Simulation, or DAViS, used the software y-cruncher on a machine using the Ubuntu 20.04 operating system to create their precise calculations.
Keller said it took his team about three days to assemble their computer and 108 days and 9 hours to perform the computation that resulted in pi being calculated to the 62,831,853,071,796th digit.
The previous record, more than 31.4 trillion digits, was set by Google employees in 2019.
“The main challenge is the enormous amount of data this calculation produces and to keep the computation running over several months without data loss,” Keller told Guinness. “I did a lot of test runs, calculating pi to lower numbers of digits, to get a firm idea on what to expect during a record attempt.”
