What Happened on January 6th

Using a desktop computer in an academic pursuit that regularly employs multi-million dollar supercomputers, Fabrice Bellard announces he has computed pi to roughly 2.7 trillion digits and reveals his methods used in accomplishing this task. At the time, the feat was a new world record. Faster computers and ambitious mathematicians routinely push computing limits in breaking this record. Computing pi had also been tackled by some of the earliest of electronic computers. In 1949, for example, the ENIAC took the number to over 2,000 places, a process that took nearly 3 days of computing time to complete.