(Thats a lot of pi [found on http://www.piday.org/million.php ])
3.
1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209 7494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651 3282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102 7019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461…
If more company leaders followed this example of selflessness instead of being so fucking greedy the economy wouldn’t be so shitty. I mean really, just how much money do you really need to have.
This dude is fucking awesome. \m/
Very inspiring and an awesome role model. I would like to make a presentation on this guy to the entrepreneurial organization I’m in.
I’m also willing to bet that this guy is a thousand times better at being a CEO than the jackasses here who are rewarded for being unable to keep a company afloat.
The “Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime” Could Change This Modern World
Math breakthroughs don’t often capture the headlines—but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life.
Here’s a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal—say the waves of sound made by speaking. They work by reducing the complex wave pattern to a simple and pretty short list of numbers that, when run through the system again, result in a very good approximation of the original signal. FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms) are simply a way of making this magic happen in a digital computer, but the combination of math and machine means the FFT has revolutionized science and many industries that have technology at their core. Which is why it’s been labeled the “most important algorithm of our lifetime.”
Now, you should remember that sound waves, and both picture and video signals, are all handled by processors in your TV, PC, and phone, and that the radio waves that whizz through the air to keep us all connected to the Internet need digital processing too. That’s every compressed sound signal that you listen to as an MP3 or similar format, most every image that you snap with your smartphone or DSLR, every image frame in the video you’re watching on your TV streamed over the Net, many images—such as those from an MRI—your doctor uses to diagnose your disease and every burst of radio that connects your cell phone to the nearest tower or your PC to its Wi-Fi router.
So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. It means that if you use existing hardware to do the math, it’ll be quicker at solving the problem you’ve set—so you need less compute time to do the task. If you’re talking about a portable computer like the one in your smartphone, that means it can spend more time doing other things instead. And with the valuable computing and battery resources of these portable devices under such pressure (you wouldn’t want your phone to be laggy now, would you?) that’s a good thing.
