JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
“How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.”--mnemonic device by James Jeans on remembering pi to 15 places, where each word length assoicates a number in pi. Arndt, Jörg; Haenel, Christoph (2006). Pi Unleashed. Springer-Verlag, pp 44-5.
There are simpler ways of remembering something than developing an odd mnemonic for remembering pi, especially when the memory device will get you only 30 places or so…and so it hardly feels worth the effort to remember some posie and then write it down to perform a pi-matic numerical translation. This is especially so when you consider that the man recognized as being the world record holder but not so (Akira Haraguchi) committed the fist 100,000 places of pi and took nearly a day to recite it–megaefforts like this make the smaller accomplishments of remembering pi to 100 places seem fairly insignificant.
Some of the people set to remembering pi (piphilologists) use methods similar to this as memory devices, including an entire book of 10,000 words constructed in just this way–many more, I think, use a memory palace/method of loci method, locating numbers and identifying sub-patterns and placing them in connecting “departments” in the brain. (The Big Book on memory devices is by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, 1966; also Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Viking Penguin, 1984.)
I’m not sure what the need is for remembering the number to so many places when it seems as though the first seven digits will be sufficient for most (when “most” = “just about everything”) things.
On remembering pi, from Nature, volume 72, p 558, 1905:
