Pi Buster

[rebbonk]

A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.

Fabrice Bellard told AFP he used an inexpensive desktop computer -- and not a supercomputer used in past records -- to calculate Pi to nearly 2.7 trillion decimal places.

That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.

Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.577 billion digits.

story here http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100108/od_afp/sciencemathematicsfranceoffbeat_20100108151509