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Colin Percival, a 19-year-old mathematics student at Simon Fraser University
in British Columbia, has set a new record by working out the quadrillionth
binary digit of &pgr; (pi), the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Percival used a formula that expresses &pgr; as an infinite sum, and combined the
results from 1734 computers in more than 50 countries linked via the Internet.
“By splitting the sum into sub-ranges—first million terms, next million
terms, and so on—it was easy to split the calculation between machines,”
he explains.