Sunday, July 03, 2005

Yeah, but can he help me study for the GRE math section?

59-year-old Akira Haraguchi of Japan, looks to have set the world record for remembering pi to the most places. He recalled pi to the 83,431st decimal place. For those to long removed from their pre-college math days, pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter used in all sorts of geometric equations.

Haraguchi started reciting numbers Friday morning, but lost his place around 16,000 (I hate it when that happens) and started over until he reached his current record. He didn't reach that mark until midnight on Saturday.

As expected, there are lots of sites devoted to the greatness of pi, which also is celebrated every March 14 (3/14...how cute). There's a pi research page that lets you search for any number string and see where and how often it appears in the first 200 million pi digits. If you'd like, you can see the first 100,000 digits. There was also a 1998 movie call Pi for whatever that's worth.



A supercomputer calculated pi to 1.24 trillionth decimal places in 2002, but the actual number doesn't have much usage past the first 10 places or so in normal activities.

Curious to see how you'd stack (or count) up to Haraguchi? Here are the first 1,000 pi decimal places...time to start remembering:

3.
141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944

592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647

093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559

644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165

271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273

724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360

011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953

092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885752724

891227938183011949129833673362440656643086021394946395224737

190702179860943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132

000568127145263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901

224953430146549585371050792279689258923542019956112129021960

864034418159813629774771309960518707211349999998372978049951

059731732816096318595024459455346908302642522308253344685035

261931188171010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303

598253490428755468731159562863882353787593751957781857780532

17122680661300192787661119590921642019

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