not-so-humble pi

By Todd Stadler · Monday, October 21, 2002 6:00pm

You know, a few years ago, I memorized the first one hundred twenty (120) digits of pi.

I first started memorizing ? meditating on, even ? this most famous of the transcendental numbers in a high school algebra class, over a decade ago.

At the time, it was a way to pass the time. But soon, it became a way to impress people by not so much impressing them as making them wonder if I was right in the head.

It's not every day, after all, that one meets a person who has memorized the first {mumble} digits of pi.

Or so I thought. Then I met the internet, a computer network so vast that it had no trouble pointing to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who had memorized far more seemingly-random digits than I could ever be bothered to. Yes, the internet, Where Free Time Goes to Die.

Well, you can imagine how cheesed-off I was the day I opened up my web browser and became decidedly less unique in the world of human digit sequencers.

I mean, what's the point of being ? perhaps ? the best pi-memorizer on my block by fifty digits, when some bloke two IP addresses over has memorized two-hundred digits more? I mean, really.

So I gave up.

Oh, sure, I still retained the original fifty or sixty first digits or so ? one doesn't easily forget that when one is working on stretching beyond the hundredth digit, after all ? but I gave up trying to be more impressive.

I still rattle them off when the party conversation has become sufficiently desperate to merit several minutes of more-or-less-unverifiable mathematical memorization magic.

But that's all old hat now. I have a new plan to be take the digital retention world by storm.

I'm going to be the first person to memorize pi ... backwards!