Survey posted 2000-03-15 16:54 by Andy.

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49 people can recite over 200 something digits of pi? HA! I really doubt that one. But...


I can recite this far (I worked on it last night!):

3.1415926535897932384626433

Now, for regular ordinary math, you probably don't need to know more than 3.14159 or so, even if you're some sort of rocket scientist, 3.1415926535898 should be enough, don't you think?

~jf~

50,000
I am the master

3.14159265359 That's 12 decimal places.

I have memorized 1000. I can also if given any number between 1 and 1000, state the digit at that position. So if someone picks 763 for instance, I can tell them the 763rd digit.

Well I must say that I find THAT hard to believe, but if it's true then kudos because that's quite impressive. As far as more limited memorization goes (limited in a relative interpretation), a few hundred digits is not particularly difficult. Like a lot of people I decided one day to see what I could do in terms of memorization. I'd look for the smaller patterns within the wholescale irregularity... things that just sort of seem to work together like 693993 or 8998628 or 32823. Anyway, I'd piece them together during class or while walking home from the bus stop or something, and in a few days I hit something like 273. Then I stopped "practicing" for lack of a better word, for a few months and was left with a little over a hundred in long term memory. Then came pi day. I decided 100 wasn't enough, so in an hour that morning I memorizeda further 200. And yeah - fifty of those were gone by evening, and another hundred over the next few weeks, but the point remains that you can memorize a lot in a relatively short amount of time as long as you have some sort of consistent and personally functional method. Repetition's also a pretty good bet. Anyway, that's my unintentionally long-winded two cents.


"A mathematician is a device for converting coffee into theorems."