Emma Haruka Iwao grew up fascinated by pi. Now, she's computed over 31 trillion of its digits.

Iwao set the newest Guinness World Record for the most accurate value of pi on Thursday. The Google employee and her team calculated 31,415,926,535,897 digits of pi – crushing a 2016 record by trillions of digits.

And it all traces back to her childhood curiosity about the mathematical constant — the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

"I liked computers when I was a kid," she tells National Public Radio's Here & Now. "And I learned some people use computers to calculate millions and billions of digits of pi. It seemed so fascinating to me."

Pi was first estimated thousands of years ago, and by the mid-20th century, mathematicians had calculated about 1,000 digits of the number, using a gear-driven calculator. But the birth of the digital computer in the 20th-century supercharged efforts to estimate pi more precisely. By 2009, Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba was calculating about 2.6 trillion digits of pi with a supercomputer.

Side note: and from March 14, 2019, forward, March 14th became known as "Pi Day."

More Info: www.wikipedia.org