Happy Pi Day courtesy of Richard Green.
This post reminds me of the memory palace memorization technique. You can read/learn more here:
The Secrets of Sherlock’s Mind Palace via Smithsonian.com
TED talk, Feats of memory anyone can do
#ScienceEveryday
Originally shared by Richard Green
How to remember 100,000 digits of pi
The retired Japanese engineer Akira Haraguchi (1946–) claims to hold the world record for reciting the most memorized digits of the number pi. He set the record starting at 9am on October 3, 2006, and reached digit number 100,000 at 1.28am on October 4, 2006.
The event was filmed in a public hall near Tokyo. Haraguchi took 5-minute breaks to eat every two hours, and even his trips to the toilet were filmed to prove that the feat was genuine. This broke Haraguchi’s previous record of 83,431 digits, which he performed from July 1–2, 2005.
The reason I say that Haraguchi claims to hold the record is that, for some reason, the Guinness World Records organization has failed to recognize this achievement, despite the existence of witnesses and detailed documentation. The Guinness-recognized record for reciting pi is 67,890 digits by Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student from China, who recited the digits, without error, in 24 hours and 4 minutes.
Haraguchi’s technique for memorizing long lists of numbers is quite interesting. He assigns kana characters to each number, each of which represents a Japanese syllable. In his system, the digit 0 can be read as o, ra, ri, ru, re, ro, wo, on or oh; the digit 1 can be read as a, i, u, e, hi, bi, pi, an, ah, hy, hyan, bya, or byan; and there are analogous rules for the other digits.
Using this system, Haraguchi has created many stories and poems, including a story about the 12th century hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune. The first 15 digits of pi, which are 3.14159265358979, are rendered in Haraguchi’s system as the words saishi ikokuni mukosan kowakunaku, whose approximate meaning is “the wife and children have gone abroad; the husband is not scared.”
Given all this, it may be surprising to learn that as a child, Haraguchi was neither a prodigy nor a mathematical genius. On the contrary, one of his teachers once made him stand to attention in the hallway as a punishment for badly failing to memorize multiplication tables of one-digit numbers.
Relevant links
Akira Haraguchi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi
Minamoto no Yoshitsune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamoto_no_Yoshitsune
The Kana writing system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana
A 2006 article from the Japan Times about Haraguchi: http://goo.gl/d4H2pB
It looks as if the article’s URL may change at some point, so you may want to Google the article’s title instead: How can anyone remember 100,000 numbers?
The web site http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/ maintains a list of records of reciting from memory digits of the irrational numbers pi, e, and the square root of 2.
Picture credit: Travis Morgan
Picture source and associated poem: https://www.flickr.com/photos/morgantj/5575500301/in/photolist
#mathematics #piday
