March 14 (or 3/14) is National Pi Day, in honor of the famous number that starts with 3.14 and goes on infinitely. This past August, a team of computer scientists at the University of Applied Sciences in Graubünden, Switzerland, generated the digits of pi to a record-breaking length: 62.8 trillion digits!
The task was performed by a new supercomputer, a powerful device designed to store huge amounts of data—400 to 800 times more than a normal laptop. It took 108 days and nine hours to complete the pi calculation.
Julia Collins, a mathematician at Edith Cowan University in Australia, expects this new record will be broken again soon. “We will never ‘finish’ computing the digits of pi,” she says. “There will always be more to find.”