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Wednesday Is Pi Day

Posted by kdawson on from the secant-tangent-cosine-sine dept.

mrbluze points us to an AP writeup on the upcoming Pi Day — 3-14 (which some will observe at 1:59 pm). The article notes: "[T]he world record [for reciting the number Pi] 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," and mentions in passing a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.

3 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. 1337 by HetMes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Following the discussion about the date/time format, in continental Europe we proud ourselves in experiencing 13-3-7, or 1337...

  2. Re:I live in Europe by pryonic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've never understood the logic behind the American way of writing dates. I'm not trying to troll here, it just seems illogical to me.

    Here at my office we use both the European and International numerican dates forms, depending on the sitation:

    European: DD/MM/YYYY
    International: YYYY/MM/DD

    As you can the units of time (days, months, years) ascend or descend in order e.g. in the European format you go from the smallest unit (days) through the midsized (months) up to the largest (years). In the International format the same descends from largest first.

    But with the American format you start with the month, then go to the smallest, then to the largest. It just seems totally illogical to me, anyone know why it's done that way?

    --
    Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
  3. Re:100000 digits? by fLiXUs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are plenty of memory techniques. Didn't you know there is a world championship in remembering things? See for instance http://www.worldmemorychampionship.com/ or http://www.worldmemorychallenge.com/.


    If you want a tip, here's something a read in a book by a Norwegian memory world champion, Oddbjørn By:

    1. Assign each 2 digit number to a person and an action related to that person. The person has two names, so the first character of each name represent one of the digits.
    2. Now you can represent 4 digits with a person and an action. This will give you 4 with different first characters.
    3. Imagine locations on a known path.
    4. Assign a person doing an action at each location.
    5. Now you have 4 digits per location on your path... Just make a very long path and you'll have 1,000,000 digits (250,000 locations*) in no time!
    6. To recite the number, just traverse your path and look at the name of the person in each location, and the name of the person associated with the action.



    *You probably want less locations, so you can visit the same one under different conditions. E.g. during day / night / rain / snow / heavy winds... we're down to 50,000 locations already!