Editions   North America | Europe | Magazine

WhatTheyThink

Record-breaking HP Print Project: 3.14…to the One Millionth Digit

Press release from the issuing company

Numberphile, a YouTube channel dedicated to videos about numbers, partnered with HP Specialty Printing Systems OEM customer HSA Systems to print one million digits of the mathematical constant Pi on a single piece of paper. See videos demonstrating how they produced the print here and when they unrolled it on a U.K. airfield here. 

Powered by HP Thermal Inkjet 2.5 technology, Denmark-based HSA Systems brought Numberphile’s quirky idea to life using only one HP Durable Black print cartridge – just 8 mL of ink – and one roll of brown 70gsm Kraft Paper in 40 minutes. The number was formatted in eight point Courier New font.

“HP ink withstood challenging U.K. weather conditions like wind, rain and mist, and the last digit was printed as clear as the first one,” said Brady Haran, filmmaker and video journalist, Numberphile. “This is a remarkable proof point for the reliability, consistency and efficiency of Original HP inks.”

This unique project has already been rated as a world record by an independent mathematical professor, and its official application for the Guinness Book of World Records has been submitted. 

Discussion

By Pat Berger on Oct 27, 2014

May of this year Mercer Color Corporation printed a Π poster 18 inches x 24 inches with 5,942,157 digits printed over a ghosted background of Π. The 5,942,157 digits were easy coming up with a background screen with dots smaller than the spaces in the 0,4,6,8,9 of the .7 point type was the difficult part. Using proprietary software we made an algarithem for the small dots placement.
So HP went long wasteing paper while we went small conserving resources and produced 4,942,157 more digits.

 

By William Adams on Oct 28, 2014

Far more interesting to determine how many digits of pi one can print where each successive digit is scaled down in proportion to its effect on the calculation (e.g., 3 is 100 pt. type, .1 is 10 pt. type, 4 is 1 pt. type, &c.) --- Don Knuth worked up a program to do that in TeX.

 

Discussion

Join the discussion Sign In or Become a Member, doing so is simple and free

WhatTheyThink is the official show daily media partner of drupa 2024. More info about drupa programs