Boffin calculates Pi to record 2.7 trillion digits

A computer scientist has used a humble desktop computer to calculate Pi to a record 2.7 trillion digits.

Fabrice Bellard says it took his computer 131 days to make the calculation which beats the previous record - set using a supercomputer - by 123 billion digits.

He used a custom program on his PC to work out the gargantuan number which takes over a terabyte of hard disk space to store.

Apparently the number is so long that if you were to recite it at a pace of one number a second, it would take more than 49,000 years… but it would still be more interesting that Celebrity Big Brother.