Fabrice Bellard - Wikipedia

Fabrice Bellard (French pronunciation: ​[fa.bʁis bɛ.laʁ] ) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunications company, with Franck Spinelli.

Bellard was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France and went to school in Lycée Joffre (Montpellier), where, at age 17, he created the executable compressor LZEXE.[2] After studying at École Polytechnique, he went on to specialize at Télécom Paris in 1996.

In 1997, he discovered a new, faster formula to calculate single digits of pi in binary representation, known as Bellard's formula. It is a variant of the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula.

Bellard's entries won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest three times.[3] In 2000, he won in the category "Most Specific Output"[4] for a program that implemented the modular Fast Fourier Transform and used it to compute the then biggest known prime number, 26972593−1 (in the sense that it prints the decimal representation of this number, which itself is assumed to be known).[5] In 2001, he won in the category "Best Abuse of the Rules" for a tiny compiler (the source code being only 3 kB in size) of a strict subset of the C language for i386 Linux. The program itself is written in this language subset, i.e. it is self-hosting. In 2018, he won in the category "Most inflationary"[6] for an image decompression program.[7]

Leave a Comment