Pi Day: a Google employee breaks the world record of computing the pi

Emma Haruka Iwao worked for four months on the project in which she calculated pi at 31.4 billion digits.

Pi holds a special place in the world of mathematics. It is an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter.

Iwao made her calculations primarily at Google's Osaka, Japan office, where she works as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud. Rightly, she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to generate this extremely long number. This is the first record of pi calculated on the cloud.

"It was my childhood dream, a long-time dream, to break the pi world record," Iwao told CNN Business. She has worked in this direction since the age of 12, when she downloaded software to calculate the value of pi on her personal computer.

Iwao said that she had had help from the final calculation of Alexander Yee, who had invented a program called "y-cruncher" for calculating pi and other constants. His former teacher and world record holder, Daisuke Takahashi, helped her with technical advice and strategies.

In addition to being a convenient way to promote Google's cloud products, Iwao's new record shows how much cloud computing technology has evolved.

The 31,415,926,535,897 figures in its calculation in pi can be downloaded by anyone wishing to experiment with the data. In the past, if you wanted to share the oldest version of pi, you had to put it on a hard drive and send it by mail.

"We continue to invest in the cloud and things improve over time," Iwao said. "Let's hope we can do an even bigger calculation in the future."