Pi. It's the best letter in the greek alphabet. It's the ratio of a perfect circle's circumference to its diameter. It's an irrational (or transcendental if you want to sound really smart) real number. It's just plain awesome.
What's the big deal about pi? What attracts nerds and geeks around the world to it? I'm not completely sure. It's certainly not the only number that has numbers that go on forever without repeating. It's just cool.
How many digits do you have memorized?
Currently I have 325 digits of pi memorized. (Not including the 3) Abijah and I enjoy reciting pi together in front of people. That way it basically proves that we aren't just saying random numbers. But, seriously, it's not really possible to just say random numbers that quickly. You start counting or throwing in tens or twenties into the "random" numbers. It's harder than you might think. I guess we couldn't really prove that we are in fact reciting pi, but why would we memorize a different set of numbers?
Anyhow, that's not really important. What is important is that you can hear us recite pi right where you are! (How thrilling!)
Note: You might need to right click and "save link as" if just clicking on it doesn't work for you.
How did you memorize it?
When I think about it, it seems pretty incredible that all of these "random" numbers are in my brain, but it really wasn't that difficult. We don't waste all of our free time just memorizing numbers. The method that we used was just grouping the numbers into sets of numbers rather than each number individually. What groups did you use, then? Here! I'll show you!
Why are there some groups of 2, 3, 5 and 6 and not just 4? Well, those groups of numbers just made sense to be grouped together. Like 8164. That's just easy to remember because 8 squared is 64. What's the 1 for, then? Well, it sort of connects the 8 to the 64, which in a way means squared. Or 442 881. Those had to be sets of 3 because 4 multiplied by 2 (or even 4 + 4) is 8! I would recommend you coming up with your own sets that make crazy sense in your head! It helps memorization.
Things I've obtained for memorizing pi
To prove that memorizing pi is not a complete waste of time, here are some things I've won or received from memorizing it:
won a competition in 8th grade (when I first memorized 70 digits--was told I'd get a plaque but didn't)
