It looks like I’ve missed Pi Day by some fraction of a day, but I can’t help but get a little excited when this special day rolls around — especially if pi turns into pie. And, while I can’t remember much past 3.14159 in my head, I know that calculating pi to some outrageous number of digits can be pretty exciting and that we can do that fairly easily on Unix systems.

Want to calculate pi to 1,000 digits? 314,159 digits? No problem. You can select just how many digits you want to see, plug that number into a calculation that I’m about to share, and … voila! OK, depending on how many digits you’ve selected, there may be quite some time between your hitting the enter key and your shouting “Voila!”. But let’s take a look at what I should have explained yesterday.

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