Computing Pi beyond 40 digits is pointless except as an academic exercise. Any phone today can compute pi to 100 digits even with inefficient programming.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It's about 12.5 billion miles away. NASA only needs 15 decimal digits of pi to have an error margin of 1.5 inches at that distance.
If we used 40 digits of pi, you could calculate the circumference of the entire known or visible universe. About 46 billion light-years. To an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
There is no need for 1 million digits of pi, or waste 100 days to calculate trillions of digits.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/I think I just printed pi on one of my school paper notebooks or something to 50 digits and used that as the cover. 3.1415xxxxxx ... heh.
We had some pretty interesting discussion around the Pi (
that's a one way to forget the dip), well when I posted Pi-day my goal wasn't about how many digits do we need to precisely measure the area of a circle or galaxy or even visible universe. Neither the Google's engineer's when they calculated up to 31.4 trillion decimal places. It's just interesting and intriguing to humans that a simple shape like circle can be so complex and unsolvable to humans.
I have heard it as a counter argument to
Simulation theory that these irrational number like Pi proves that we are not in a simulation. Some times in fictional stories that shows some advance level aliens who claims to know the true value of Pi.
As a mostly layman when it comes to maths (and sciences) funzies, could it be that one of the goals of continuing to attempt to calculate pi to further digits is to see if there might be a zero in there somewhere (I mean a last digit)? - and then we know how many actual digits pi has, rather than what seems to be an infinite number of digits without a last digit.
and yes JayJuanGee is right goal may be is to find if there is a last digit, yes you may ask ok what if we found the last digit? Nothing...!!! but it will be another mystery that we humans will be able to solve.
We already know the answer to this: Pi has an infinite number of digits (i.e., there is no "last digit"). This is because Pi is an irrational number (it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers). Proof of this dates back to the 18th century (Lambert, 1761). The square root of 2 (1.414...) is another well-known irrational number.
You are absolutely right and for the matter of fact its not only the square root of 2 but all square roots of natural numbers (of course other than of perfect squares) are irrational.
We all
(except Jay) know that
π is an irrational sonofabitch; but is he
normal? 
Normal? before that tell me if Pi is he or she?
----
Well not sure why you need to know this but in first million digits of Pi's only 9 appears 6 times in a row "
999999" and that point is called
Feynman pointAnd there are multiple fivers
00000 1 times
11111 1 times
22222 1 times
33333 2 times
44444 0 times
55555 2 times
66666 2 times
77777 0 times
88888 0 times
99999 3 times
and remember
Pi is 748/238Any way to conclude I would argue should we stop here approximating Pi? I would say no, I think we need to continue the quest for a more and bring it on.... not to measure the circumference of the universe but for our own curiosity.
It becomes irrelevant once we hit Planck length, 3 somethign is good enough. So still inside a simulation
