<p>Back in college we had a friend who briefly held The Guinness World Record for memorizing Pi. It was well up in the thousands at the time.</p>
<p>He eventually got a Ph.D from Yale and is an English Prof now. Fascinating guy.</p>
<p>garland–that’s just…insane. :eek:</p>
<p>Saw a piece on TV about this guy…some fellow who can recite pi to 100,000 places (world record, beating his previous 22,000). He assigns a person, animal, whatever to each numeral and makes a story! OK that helps.</p>
<p>(I can’t say I remember what I had for breakfast yesterday)</p>
<p>Wow. Our friend decided that once was fun, but around that time the record was being attacked constantly, and he opted not to keep up.</p>
<p>He said he memorized in blocks of 100. I think he could pretty much “see” each block.</p>
<p>Pi to 100,000 places??!! That’s incredible!!</p>
binx
March 16, 2007, 1:26pm
26
<p>Excerpts from an API story my SIL sent me on Pi Day:</p>
<p>
This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental-health counselor in Japan, puts it: “What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi.”</p>
<p>He said this one day last fall after accurately reciting pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours. He does not hold the Guinness world record, only because he has not submitted the required documentation to Guinness. But he has his story.</p>
<p>(Incidentally, the world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness.)…</p>
<p>And then there are people like Marc Umile…</p>
<p>What he created was what is believed to be U.S. record for pi memorization — 12,887 digits. He typed them into a spreadsheet at aa Philadelphia law office — three-and-a-half hours, 1,000 numbers at a time, with two smoke breaks…</p>
<p>He says he made a mistake in his training: He told too many people what he was up to. His wife, his family — they were rooting foor him. Most of the rest dismissed him as a weirdo…</p>
<p>A software engineer in Virginia named Mike Keith wrote a poem to pi, a “piem.” A love letter, in a way. To say that it is a something to behold is an understatement: It is nearly 4,000 words long — and thee length in letters of each word corresponds to pi’s digits.</p>
<p>In other words, if you can remember the poem — which riffs on T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Act V of “Hamlet” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” among other texts — you too caan recite pi.
</p>
<p>Kinda makes time spent on CC seem mild?</p>