Slashdot | 83,431 Recited Digits of Pi

Slashdot | 83,431 Recited Digits of Pi:


"I'm a Japanese. Once in my junior high days (7th grade for you 'mericans), I got so bored with the math class that I decided to memorize Pi on the textbook. It had something like 47 digits. It took no time and during that 45 minutes session, I memorized it. I still seem to remember it.

Curiously, the Pi World Ranking List had meny Japanese and Indian names. This is sort of understandable. Both cultures used to emphasize on memorizing texts for a long long time. Up until my grandfather's generation, being educated meant being able to recite the whole Confucius, and some other assorted Chinese classics. In my schooldays, too, we were forced to memorize bunch of stuff that turned out to be useless (pi was not one of them though :). Coming up with a mnemonic is kinda part of culture. The way I used to memorize pi was to cut it at every four digits and try to associate some kind of logic with each chunk. For example, 3.14 1592 6535 8979 3238 4626 each of four digit groups seems to have some kind of pattern, except the first one, no?

In India, too, traditional education for Brahmins started as memorizing the Veda transmitted to their family. There still are some people who can recite a whole Veda. Those people tended to memorize other stuff as well.

Probably for the Japanese and Indians, memorizing some long strings that don't make sense is not that a strange thing.

By the way, I am a Sanskritist, not a mathematician."