Pi Calculation Record
In 1997, he discovered a new, faster formula to calculate single digits of pi in binary representation, known as Bellard's formula. It is a variant of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula.
On December 31, 2009, he claimed the world record for calculations of π, having calculated it to nearly 2.7 trillion places in 90 days. Slashdot wrote: "While the improvement may seem small, it is an outstanding achievement because only a single desktop PC, costing less than $3,000, was used — instead of a multi-million dollar supercomputer as in the previous records." On August 2, 2010, this record was eclipsed by Shigeru Kondo who computed 5 trillion digits, although this was done using a server-class machine running dual Intel Xeons, equipped with 96GB of RAM.
Read more about this topic: Fabrice Bellard
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