Pi at the centre of an Indian student’s curiosity

If you’re just getting out of high school, have a strong intellectual curiosity that needs a challenge, and come from a country that’s increasingly known worldwide for its software skills, what do you do?

Sayan Chakraborti chose to set up a project to calculate the transcendental mathematical number pi.

Kolkata-based Chakraborti, just completing his twelfth standard, has been a science student at South Point High School and is “interested in everything from arts to science and from football to chess.”

But, his favourite subject is physics, which he enjoys along with computer science and math. Keeping all this in mind, the teenager and free software enthusiast launched a project for “Calculating Pi.”

Out on Sourceforge.net—a global collaborative centre for the free software and open source network—this project is working to calculate the transcendental mathematical number pi to a higher number of decimal places than before. “If you are a mathematician or programmer please contribute ideas or code for this project,” says the youngster.

Non professionals are also welcome to contribute. Quite a few contributions are already online. Every achievement is announced to code enthusiasts globally. For instance, recently, a new program was just released for calculating pi, using a digit-extraction algorithm. See projectpi.sourceforge.net for more details on the algorithm.

What made him take up this project? Says Sayan Chakraborti: “Just like climbing Everest, we calculate pi because it’s there.”
Chakraborti has been calculating pi since he was told, as a schoolboy, that it is the same for all circles. “I used to chalk out huge circles and measure them with a scale on my terrace. The “Calculating Pi” project started with a class assignment program which computed the number of integer points inside a circle. I used it to estimate the area.

The project application at SourceForge.net website was approved in May 2002,” explains Chakraborti.

Relevance
But how is this all relevant to the common man? Says Chakraborti: “It doesn’t help reduce the price of bread. But it helps find problems with computer hardware and operating systems, so it might actually help to reduce the price of bread... someday. Somebody once said that ‘Physics is like sex; of course it can give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.’ Same case here.”

For him, it has been mostly a case of do-it-yourself. But his teachers have helped out with the maths and the programming in a few cases.

Says the wunderkid: “I like the ideology behind free software, but that’s not the reason why I use it. I use free software because it helps me get more out of my meagre resources. I write free software so that it can be peer reviewed and bettered.”

With such interest, surely he would have other plans for the future too. Chakraborti does. “We plan to release programs with new formulas, which I constantly try to come up with,” says he. For instance, only recently he came up with a formula where you start with x=3 and iterate x=x+sin(x) “till you are happy with the answer.” It is quadratically convergent, meaning that it gives more and more accurate answers each time.

Another of his friends, Sayamindu Dasgupta, is helping to take his software code further. Dasgupta, is trying to port the math.h program, which he wrote using it, to gmp.h They also have plans for cluster-based programs using Beowulf or OpenMOSIX.