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\centerline{Computer's 16 Million Pieces of Pi}

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\noindent
Washington

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In the beginning, there was pi = 3.14.

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Then, as mathematicians spent more time contemplating the number that 
measures the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle,
there was a more precise calculation of pi: 3.14159.

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Over the centuries, people devoted years, decades, whole lifetimes to further
refinements of pi: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884171$\ldots$ and so on.

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Now, mathematicians using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo have
calculated the value of pi to 16 million decimals places.

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To print the number in a newspaper would take roughly two full Sunday editions
of a major newspaper, and every page would contain nothing but numbers.

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But then, nobody has any intention of printing the new calculation.

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``It would be such a waste of time and paper,'' said John W.~Wrench, a
retired Navy Department mathematician who edits the scholarly journal
Mathematics of Computation, which will report the Japanese breakthrough
in its next edition.

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Why bother to calculate a gargantuan number that nobody will ever see or use?

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``It's just so fascinating,'' said Wrench who held the record briefly in 1961
when he computed---and printed---pi to 100,000 places.

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Archimedes, the Greek who developed the first important formulas for finding
pi in the second century B.C., realized that the constant had to be an
``irrational'' number, that is, one that would never come out even no matter
how many decimal places were computed. He was content to work with 3.14.

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Early in the Christian era, men began computing the decimals further.
Centuries of painstaking pencil-and-paper calculations had produced the
first 800 decimal places by 1949, when digital computers were put on the
case.

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Today, humans work out the algorithms---the procedures for computers to 
follow---and let the machines perform the dirty work.

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Wrench said the Japanese computer took about 24 hours to get up to the
16-millionth digit.

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\rightline{Washington Post}

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