Happy Pi Day! Tomorrow, 3-14 (because of 3.14), is Pi Day, and it is also Einstein’s birthday. As an Asian American blog, we should take this opportunity to crack out the math books to celebrate.
There really is an Asian component to this too. Mr. Chao Lu is the world record holder for reciting pi to the most decimal places (67,890). It took him a year to memorize the digits, and it took 24 hours and four seconds with no sleep or bathroom breaks to actually recite them. 24 hours without taking a leak. That’s some serious chi gung power.
Check out his interview here:
6. Did you use a special technique to memorize all these digits ?
Yes. It is based on many traditional techniques of memorizing. I just did some improvement. It is difficult for me to explain it in English because of my poor English. And it has some relationship with Chinese language. I haven’t given it a special name yet. And now I am going to publish a book to fully explain it. I can send you a copy when the book is finished if you like. but I am sorry to say that it was written in Chinese. And the main purpose of the book is to teach students how to memorize efficiently on their study, not only on numbers.
And man, he dusted his competition. #2 is only at 43,000 decimal places. According to my calculations, he beat #2 by 57.883721%!
According to this, the Chinese may have discovered pi. I guess Lu brought the trophy back home.
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I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
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I bet he memorized the numbers in Chinese, right?
There have been studies that show because it takes less number of sounds of numbers in Chinese and other Asian languages versus other languages (like English), it’s actually easier for the human brain to memorize more digits.
I don’t know what language he used. That’s a lot of digits though!!!