Printing π


π is wonderful when served Texas style! 
Remember the Á la mode!!


Simply to print an approximation to π to many digits can be a major problem. A single line printed on ordinary paper can display 100 digits. A page of 50 lines will then contain 5,000 digits. Printing on both sides, each sheet of paper can hold 10,000 digits.

A ream of 500 sheets is approximately 5 cm thick.

The table then gives the approximate thickness of paper needed to print a given number of digits. Clearly for approximations containing more than a million digits, it is not practical or useful actually to print the results of a computation! In reality having this in an electronic format is much prefered anyway.


digits pages sheets  thickness 
(cm)		 thickness 
(m)		 thickness 
(km)
10,000 2 1 0.01   
100,000 20 10 0.1   
1,000,000 200 100 1 0.01  
10,000,000 2,000 1,000 10 0.1  
100,000,000 20,000 10,000 100 1  
1,000,000,000 200,000 100,000 1,000 10 0.01 
10,000,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 10,000 100 0.1 
100,000,000,000 20,000,000 10,000,000 100,000 1,000 1 
  1,000,000,000,000   200,000,000   100,000,000 1,000,000 10,000 10 


With over 1,200,000,000,000 digits calculated (as of 2002) it would take a stack of sheets of paper over 12 km (or about 7.5 miles) thick to print the entire approximation.