Emma Haruka Iwao

Emma Haruka Iwao (she/her) is a computer scientist and Cloud developer advocate who held the Guinness World Record in 2019 for the most accurate calculation of pi (the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter). Iwao, who was born in Japan in 1984, became fascinated with pi at the age of twelve and downloaded a program to calculate pi on her home computer, which would inspire her future achievement. This was at a time when the World Record holders for pi calculation were also Japanese (Takahashi Daisuke, who would later become her professor, and Kanada Yasumasa). For Iwao, having relatable role models was important in realising her passion and motivation to pursue computing science as a career.

After earning two degrees in computing science and working in several software engineering positions, Iwao took a job as a solutions engineer at Google in 2015. Working her way up the career ladder, Iwao transferred to Google’s Seattle office in 2019 to continue her role as a senior developer advocate, where she would go on to set her Guinness World Record. Using 25 virtual computers and 170TB of data, Iwao ran her program through Google Cloud systems (the first time the Cloud has been used for record breaking pi calculations) for 121 days straight to calculate pi to 31 trillion digits, surpassing the previous world record by a massive 9 trillion digits.

As an openly queer woman working in the tech field, Iwao has highlighted the limited opportunities for women and LGBTQ+ individuals to pursue STEM careers, and for those that do, their achievements often go unacknowledged (for example, Rosalind Franklin’s omission from the Nobel Prize for her work on DNA structures). She has publicly expressed her hope that her achievement will inspire more women and those from LGBTQ+ backgrounds to pursue careers in computing and technological industries. In interviews with queer news outlets, Iwao has encouraged more marginalised people to consider how their novel perceptions, insights and abilities can be used to make technology more accessible for all. It is her belief that “building technology that works for everyone takes everyone”.