[ELI5] What’s the benefit of calculating Pi to now 62.8 trillion digits?
In: Mathematics
These things are often more about the journey than the destination.
There are very few uses for 62.8 trillion digits of pi. Statistical analysis of the digits might be interesting to a few professionals.
The real interest comes from *being able to*. You don’t want to test your flashy new supercomputer with something new, interesting, unknown, and important. What if it’s wrong? How would you know? No. You test it using something well known, like calculating pi. If you matched the first 30 trillion with the last people to do it, you’re good, but might as well leave it on a while longer to ‘claim the title’. This kind of tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, means knowing more and more digits is a side effect. If knowing digits of pi was super important, Amazon or Google or CERN or several others could blow 62.8 trillion out the water with relative ease. It’s the same with things like the biggest known prime. They have the computing power to ‘win’ easily. But it isn’t important so they don’t.
Latest Answers