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Nicholas Sze of Yahoo Finds Two-Quadrillionth Digit of Pi

Posted by timothy on from the I'm-a-good-guesser-in-binary-too dept.

gregg writes "A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi — and a few digits either side of it. Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit — when expressed in binary — is 0."

1 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So, what is the digit in decimal? by Haxamanish · · Score: 4, Informative

    We only know how to calculate it in binary (or any base that is a power of 2). You can't convert to decimal without know all the rest of the digits.

    Parent is correct, digits of pi can be calculated independently in base 2, 4, 8, 16 or 2^n since the 1990s. So, it is possible to calculate the 2,000,000,000,000,000th number of pi without calculating the digits before that one. Now, if we want to calculate the digit in decimal (or converse the binary digit to decimal), we need to calculate all of the two-quadrillion digits. Knowing this digit is in itself not very interesting.