How many digits of pi have been calculated?
The record stood at about 202 trillion decimal digits as of 2024, up from 100 trillion in 2022 and 62.8 trillion in 2021. Records now fall roughly annually and are set on ordinary server hardware with very large disk arrays rather than on supercomputers. There is no mathematical purpose to any of it beyond hardware validation — the digits have all the statistical properties expected of a random sequence and reveal nothing.
How the figure is arrived at
The Chudnovsky algorithm, which adds about 14 correct digits per term, evaluated by binary splitting. At these scales the computation is bound by disk throughput rather than by processor speed, because the working numbers are hundreds of terabytes long and cannot fit in memory. Verification uses the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula, which can compute an individual hexadecimal digit of pi far out in the expansion without computing any of the preceding ones — a genuinely startling property.
Record as of 2024. These fall roughly once a year, so treat the figure as a floor with a date attached.
Other numbers and possibilities counts
- How many combinations does a Rubik's Cube have? 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 — about 43 quintillion
- How many ways can you shuffle a deck of cards? about 8 × 10^67
- How many possible chess games are there? about 10^120 games; about 4.8 × 10^44 legal positions
- How many combinations are there in the lottery? 292,201,338 for Powerball
- How many possible passwords are there? 6.6 quadrillion for eight characters — 540 sextillion for twelve
- How many Sudoku puzzles are there? 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 completed grids
- How many prime numbers are there under a million? exactly 78,498
- How many possible positions are there in Go? about 2.08 × 10^170
Common questions
- How many digits of pi have been calculated?
- about 202 trillion
- How is that estimated?
- The Chudnovsky algorithm, which adds about 14 correct digits per term, evaluated by binary splitting. At these scales the computation is bound by disk throughput rather than by processor speed, because the working numbers are hundreds of terabytes long and cannot fit in memory. Verification uses the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula, which can compute an individual hexadecimal digit of pi far out in the expansion without computing any of the preceding ones — a genuinely startling property.
Related pages
- How many combinations does a Rubik's Cube have? 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 — about 43 quintillion
- How many ways can you shuffle a deck of cards? about 8 × 10^67
- How many possible chess games are there? about 10^120 games; about 4.8 × 10^44 legal positions
- How many combinations are there in the lottery? 292,201,338 for Powerball
- How many possible passwords are there? 6.6 quadrillion for eight characters — 540 sextillion for twelve
- How many Sudoku puzzles are there? 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 completed grids
- How many prime numbers are there under a million? exactly 78,498
- How many possible positions are there in Go? about 2.08 × 10^170
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)