It’s a sunny morning here in Baden-Dättwil, where the new business premises of my employer are located. Close to the building, a thirty year old donkey has its tiny meadow. Although this donkey almost prevented the construction of our new facility, it is now part of the Täfernhof II logo. How it got a golden background? No idea! Unlike the donkey in Grimm’s fairy tale Tischchen deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack, this donkey has never been observed to produce gold out of his mouth or behind. Hence, I still earn my money by developing digital X-ray detectors.
Part of my team’s work is to develop fast processing and storage solutions for our customers. For this purpose, we recently purchased a DELL PowerEdge R930 with 144 logical computing cores and 1.2 TB of RAM. It’s a pity to leave such a machine idle during the weekends! So what to do with it? The obvious answer: Breaking some world records on the computation of mathematical constants with y-cruncher. On a previous weekend, I already computed a mathematical constant called Lemniscate to a new world record precision of 190 billion digits. If you never heard of it, don’t mind! I just picked it, because it was the easiest record to break.
Now I’m curious to see whether a second computation, started on last Thursday, has finished. After logging into the server, I’m happy to see that I finally managed to set a new record on the computation of the Euler-Mascheroni constant, often represented by the Greek letter Γ. If you’d like to learn more about the significance of this constant, I recommend you to read the book Gamma by Julian Havil. A few years ago, my former mentor, who taught me programming Smalltalk, presented me with this book. 250 pages just about one number! He will be very pleased, to learn about my new record …
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