In the world of mathematics, Gregory and David Chudnovsky are known for going the extra mile.
Unsatisfied with their record 600-mile-long calculation of pi in June, the brothers more than doubled that record, coming up with a number containing more than a billion digits."They're starting more calculations, so it goes on from here," said Denis Arvay, a spokesman for IBM.
Meanwhile, six California scientists extended man's search into the infinite by determining the world's largest known prime number.
The find left Joel F. Smith, one of the researchers, groping for a way to describe the 65,087-digit number.
"It's God-awful large," Smith said. "There's nothing in the real universe that is comparable at all, that you measure in those numbers."
Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Since pi was first approximated at 3.14 in ancient Greece, it took centuries and the invention of the computer in recent decades for scientists to calculate the ratio to more than 100,000 decimal places.
But in less than three months, the Chudnovskys extended their record calculation from 480 million decimal places to more than a billion.