[ELI5] What’s the benefit of calculating Pi to now 62.8 trillion digits?
In: Mathematics
In “Contact”, the Carl Sagan book about first contact with aliens, it was suggested that hidden deep within mathematical constants there are messages or codes from the builders of this universe. So Arroway booked time on the supercomputers to go billions of digits deep into pi and other constants whose names escape me now to find the codes.
Absolutely none. 7 digits will be accurate enough for anything anyone would ever do, and 50 would allow you to compute the radius of the known universe to the width of a proton.
The practical benefits of having more digits of pi are negligible. The real benefit is in testing hardware and algorithms.
The largest possible impact would be if we calculated the next digits and found that they began to repeat. This would fundamentally undermine a fair bit of maths and lead to rapid innovation on topics/theorems that many consider “solved”.
You can find your telephone number and date of birth somewhere in that list of numbers. You can find everyone’s days of birth and telephone number in that list of numbers.
The real question here is who is checking their work?
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