Illuminati-R-Us

It is a day late, but still worth mentioning:
1 - Susanne Hippauf, of Franfurt am Main, Germany, has scored a new world record by memorizing 15.637 - yes, fifteen thousend six hundered and thirty seven, decimal places of Pi
2 - A mathematician has published a YouTube video in order to determine Pi by drifting a car.

The world hasn't qute gone all crazy yet, but I think we are doing a damn good job getting it there.

Arneb wrote:It is a day late, but still worth mentioning:
1 - Susanne Hippauf, of Franfurt am Main, Germany, has scored a new world record by memorizing 15.637 - yes, fifteen thousend six hundered and thirty seven, decimal places of Pi
2 - A mathematician has published a YouTube video in order to determine Pi by drifting a car.

The world hasn't qute gone all crazy yet, but I think we are doing a damn good job getting it there.

Watch on youtube.com

(1) I would have guessed the record was a lot more. Oh well.

(2) Without watching the video, I don’t even know what this means.

(1) Apparently, the Internet agrees with you. Frau Hippauf is listed in 23rd place, with her old record of 11,104 decimals, but her new achievement would only put her in 18th place anyway. Also, Wikipedia has this to say about an "unofficial" record (what makes a record "official", I don't know). On further research, OK, it's only a German record, and it's apparently a women's record. The Spiegel article didn't make that clear.
(2) Neither did I.

To put it into perspective, I read somewhere that NASA is currently the world's pi user with the greatest hunger for decimals, used for calculating trajectories of interplanetary probes. And they only use 37. That's less than 42!

Arneb wrote:(1) Apparently, the Internet agrees with you. Frau Hippauf is listed in 23rd place, with her old record of 11,104 decimals, but her new achievement would only put her in 18th place anyway. Also, Wikipedia has this to say about an "unofficial" record (what makes a record "official", I don't know). On further research, OK, it's only a German record, and it's apparently a women's record. The Spiegel article didn't make that clear.
(2) Neither did I.

To put it into perspective, I read somewhere that NASA is currently the world's pi user with the greatest hunger for decimals, used for calculating trajectories of interplanetary probes. And they only use 37. That's less than 42!

Based on some quick Google searches, I'm getting that the ratio of the size of the observable universe to the size of a proton is about 10^42.

So I think 37 decimal places is probably good enough for most applications.

Maybe it's just done on the honour system, and to make it official someone would actually have to listen to them and check it.
At a fairly quick 2 digits per second, it's still in the ballpark of 2 hours.

Oh yes, they are being listened to. Frau Hippauf failed to improve on her record last year, when she mixed up to digits at around position 9800 after the 3.

What's a Pi cost in Germany these days?