A budding math wizard eeked super-computer like performance out of his home P.C.
Manbir Gulati, 15, wrote a program on his laptop computer that could calculate pi out to 3 billion digits. It took just under 24 hours for his computer to complete the trick.
"I was like wow, 3 billion," Gulati told the Frederick News-Post. "I didn't expect it to happen that fast."
The record for the number of digits of pi calculated is held by a 55-year-old Japanese programmer. A program writte by Shieguru Kondo calculated 5 trillion digits of pi, taking 90 days.
Gulati has been writing computer programs for one year now. He admitted that calculating pi does not have a lot of every day uses, but the process has helped him understand computers better.
"You can break the numbers down into the smallest component," he said to the Frederick News-Post, "and feed it into the computer in the fastest possible way."
After reading a story about French scientist Fabrice Bellard, Gulati was inspired to write the program.
