How to Memorize Pi if You’re a Word Person

[LiberalArkie]

http://mentalfloss.com/article/62218/how-memorize-pi-if-youre-word-person


Pi Day is always on March 14 (3/14), but this year it’s extra special because we get two more digits because of the year (3/14/15). The day offers something for the math-lover, of course, but also for the baked-goods lover (Bake a pi pie!), the music lover (Sing some Pi Day carols!), and the parade lover (March in a pi-rade!) What about the word lover?

Pi enthusiasts have performed amazing feats of memorization, reciting the number to thousands of digits. World record holder Chao Lu has recited it to 67,890 digits without an error. But memorizing pi doesn’t have to be done through numbers—it can also be done through words. This sentence "How I wish I could calculate pi" gives you pi to seven places. Just count the number of letters in each word—3, 1, 4, 1, 5…—and you get 3.141592.

Here are some other pi sentences from the Pi Wordplay page at Wolfram Mathworld.

May I have a large container of coffee? (3.1415926)

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. (3.14159265358979)

Snip

[Brigid]

1. Pi is 3.14.

Why torture yourself?

[SheilaT]

2. Memorizing a phrase that

then requires you go back and count the number of letters in each word strikes me as a great deal more unwieldy than a straightforward memorization.

But then, my younger son memorized Pi to at least 125 digits, and once got a standing ovation for reciting them at a school talent show.

[Nye Bevan]

3. 355/113 is an amazingly accurate approximation to pi.

Easy to remember, too. Just take the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, duplicate each digit to get 113355, then take the final 3 digits divided by the first 3, 355/113.

[CK_John]

6. The nuns in the 40's used 22/7 in my 6th grade class.

[PowerToThePeople]

7. That is what I use for quick calcs. n/t

[Drifter]

4. I learned this as a kid ...

May I have a large container of orange juice now (3.141592653)

Seems a bit awkward, I will never forget this phrase.

Cheers
Drifter

[Hekate]

5. When I was just a wee kid, Mom used to carve the Greek letter Pi into the top crust....

...of her apple pies. I amused my grandson by doing the same recently with a chicken pot pie.

Tradition!

[Bosonic]

8. Just memorize the Chudnovsky algorithm

and then you can expand pi to as many digits as you can be bothered to work out

[NightWatcher]

9. No one knows past 3.1415926, so you really could just start pulling numbers outta your ass

and few people would even know it. Most people would applaud you if you rattled off 20 or 50 digits after 3.1415926.