By Jen WiecznerThe Daily Northwestern
Hidden on his dorm room computer, McCormick freshman Alex Yee keeps mathematicians’ gold: a world record.
In December, Yee set the record for calculating over 116.6 million digits of a complex mathematical constant.
His pursuit started in high school, when he started writing a computer program to calculate millions of digits.
He refined the program last fall until it calculated the record number of digits in the Euler-Mascheroni constant in 38-and-a-half hours.
Yee didn’t celebrate until he ran the program again using a different formula to make sure his calculations checked out.
“As soon as I realized they matched, I stared for two minutes at it like, ‘Oh my God,'” he said.
Then he backed up his files.
The definition of the Euler-Mascheroni constant is confusing even to many math and engineering majors. With limits and sigmas and natural logs, the formula sounds more like rocket scientist jargon than English.
Even Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Prof. Russell Joseph said he doesn’t know it by heart.
But the Euler-Mascheroni constant isn’t as obscure as it sounds.
Yee called it the most famous constant after pi and e. Joseph agreed that it occurs most frequently besides those two.
When Yee claimed the record, his high school newspaper broke the story, which ended up on the front page of Digg.com, a news site that allows readers to comment on articles.
It received so many hits it crashed his high school’s server.
Since then, it has accumulated 84 comments – many of them lampooning Yee for his conformity to the “Asian stereotype” and presumed dating habits.
But Yee, who spent almost all of his free time last quarter working on the program, was prepared for ridicule.
“There are stereotypes about people who do weird things, that they have no life,” he said. “Which is kind of true.”
One world record later, Yee said he has his life back and doesn’t care what people say.
Though his roommate jokes that he knows where Yee keeps the record and can break it, Yee has protected it by calculating more than an extra million digits that he has not released. Even if someone hacked into his files, each contains two numbers – and only Yee knows which one is correct, he said.
Despite the time and effort that it took to set a new world record, there was nothing to see when Yee broke it. Yee never saw the 116.6 millionth digit until later.
“It was just a big black screen, saying what percent was done,” Yee said.
The program saved the digits to a file because more than a few million digits on screen would have crashed his computer.
Ed Pegg Jr., co-editor of MathWorld.com, the site that credits Yee with his record, said Yee’s calculations were accepted because he had verified them using two formulas, and a third reliable party had tested them, as well.
The constant is rarely rounded more precisely than a few digits – even Yee admits that knowing more than 116 million of them has little significance.
“It’s pretty useless,” Yee said. “The digits themselves are just a bunch of random numbers. No one cares about them.”
Joseph said that although Yee’s program is an “intellectual achievement,” it probably won’t be put to any other use.
“It’s probably a demonstration of programming skill more than anything else,” he said.
Despite the speculation on Digg.com and Yee’s newfound fame, there are no groupies knocking on Yee’s door. He has received myriad Facebook.com friend requests, but not the kind he is looking for.
“All guys,” he said. “I rejected all of them.”
Yee said he still wants to optimize his program to make it faster and plans to break the record again on a friend’s computer in the future.
“But I’ve had enough of it,” he said. “I’m not coming back to it till next quarter.”
Reach Jen Wieczner at [email protected].
