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Comment by _ache_ | Hacker News Reader

Plouffe ...

He used to teach in my university. He is a fantastic man. This is serious, he is crazy about numbers. He is one of the guy behind OEIS (oeis.org).

That is not the first formula he found about pi and some of the previous one had been used to break world record about the number of known decimals.

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Probably this is a good time for your irregular reminder that Plouffe has something of a feud with Bailey and Borwein: https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math.symbolic/c/a3kVKVYJhgc?...

In my very personal opinion, the overall publication history of the three provides some rather good evidence for Plouffe's claims.

Oh thank you for the link !

In fact, I wasn't sure about the full story but the fact that Wikipedia repeatedly told that Plouffe alone discover the formula makes me think that there is a story behind that.

Ok, so the method is real but will not be used to break the next world record. Chudnovsky algorithm is better at that task.

Not this one, but algorithms that can calculate the specific digit positions but nothing else are indeed used for world records, mainly for the verification. If two radically different algorithms converge into the same digits at something like the trillionth position then you will have a high confidence for the rest of digits.

Also wouldnt this be highly parallelizable?

Yes, that fact gave rise to projects like PiHex [1]; hexadecimal digits of pi at around 10^15-th positions were already known in 2000, while the current full-digit record is only for first 10^14 decimal digits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHex

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