Remember pi? The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. You had to memorize it for all those formulas in high school geometry. It was all over the SATs. Very important number, pi.
It starts with a 3. That’s the easy part. Then a decimal point, then a 1, then, well, let’s round it off to 4. Three-point-one-four. And there, in a nutshell, is pi.
If 3.14 is pi in a nutshell, however, then Olov Windelius is the nutcracker. You see, Windelius remembers pi. Really remembers pi. As a hobby. To Windelius, pi is no more 3.14 than the Sears Tower is a two-story brownstone. In other words, something is missing. Like the next 6,000 digits.
Windelius is a member of the 1,000 Club, an organization whose only meetings are in the mind and whose only membership requirement is a perfect recollection of the first 1,000 digits of pi (for those who want to get started, 3.141592653 will take you 1 percent of the way).
The beauty of pi is that it is, in the wonderful vocabulary of mathematics, an irrational number: Its digits show no pattern and there is an infinite number of them. And that means there are plenty more for those like Windelius to memorize once the first thousand get old (believe it or not, around 42,000 more for the world record holder at last count).
How do they do it? Very slowly and very carefully, for starters. As a 6th grader, Evanston Township High School junior David Geisler memorized the first 150 digits for a school contest. (The prize? A pie, naturally.) He worked by scanning the digits over and over with index cards his math teacher had given him.
“Say I knew the first 20 and I wanted to get the next five,” Geisler explains. “I’d say those five a few times until I had them. Then I’d go back and say the first 20 plus those five until I was sure I’d gotten it. Then I’d go to the next five. At (different) points during the day, I’d go through it and see if I could remember the whole thing.” The process in all took about two months of at least 10 focused minutes a day.
“If you do too much at once, you’re not going to get very far,” Geisler says. “I would just do a little bit every day; otherwise, you’re going to forget it.” Once he got those digits down, though, they weren’t going anywhere. “The strange thing about pi is that now I can’t forget it. Those digits are stuck in my head.”
Of course, the real question when you get hundreds of perfectly intelligent folks committing thousands of seemingly meaningless digits to memory is not how they do it, but why? It’s understandable that Geisler might commit 150 digits to memory for the promise of a tasty prize, but plenty of pi people learn 10 times that number or more with no hope of acclaim. America is a land of trivial pursuits, yet even in a nation of bungee jumpers, Leonardo DiCaprio-lovers, and Beanie Baby collectors, pi memorizers seem an odd bunch. What’s going on?
In case there’s any doubt, no one in his or her right mind is doing it for the sake of mathematical precision. As Petr Beckmann writes in “A History of Pi,” “The digits beyond the first few decimal places are of no practical or scientific value. Four decimal places are sufficient for the design of the finest engines; ten decimal places would be sufficient to obtain the circumference of the earth within a fraction of an inch if the earth were a smooth sphere.”
In 1889, Beckmann tells us, German mathematician Hermann Schubert went even further.
“Conceive a sphere constructed with the Earth at its center, and imagine its surface to pass through Sirius, which is 8.8 light-years distant from the Earth,” Schubert explained. “Then imagine this enormous sphere to be so packed with microbes that in every cubic millimeter millions and millions of these diminutive animalcula are present. Now conceive these microbes to be unpacked and so distributed singly along a straight line that every two microbes are as far distant from each other as Sirius is from us, 8.8 light-years. Conceive the long line thus fixed by all the microbes at the diameter of a circle, and imagine its circumference to be calculated by multiplying its diameter by pi to 100 decimal places. Then, in the case of a circle of this enormous magnitude even, the circumference so calculated would not vary from the real circumference by a millionth part of a millimeter.
“This example,” Schubert concluded, “will suffice to show that the calculation of pi to 100 or 500 decimal places is wholly useless.”
Indeed, even if those digits were somehow useful for some microscopic future calculations, it’s difficult to imagine mortal memorizers carrying out the complex computations in their heads. Whatever the appeals of knowing pi’s thousandth digit, better real-world calculations aren’t among them.
Accuracy aside, then, there’s still the small matter of going where no memorizer has gone before. For the elite — those vaunted few who vault past the first 10,000 digits of pi without breaking a sweat or, perhaps more accurately, without bursting a blood vessel — the ultimate goal is a place in the hallowed pages of the Guinness Book of Records. Since its inception, this British best seller has immortalized everyone from the world’s lowest limbo dancer to the world’s highest Pac-Man scorer, and pi people are among those honored in its pages. It’s a hall of fame that has room for only one member per category at a time, so it’s a constant battle to see who will be this year’s pi king (or queen, though men seem to predominate the membership rolls of the 1,000 Club and its brethren). In 1975, Simon Plouffe held the record with 4,096 digits; 20 years later, Hiroyuki Goto grabbed the title with a nine-hour recitation of 42,000.
Presumably, the record’s just going to keep climbing (think of a race with no time limit or finish line and you start getting the idea), and when somebody bests Goto’s amazing feat you can be sure the folks at Guinness will be the first to know. Simply put, there’s no greater inspiration than a chance at the record books for professional pursuers of this perhaps most idle of idle pastimes.
For everyone else who memorizes part of the world beyond 3.14, they “have” pi. After all, when you memorize something, you have it — it’s free, it lasts roughly forever, and nobody can take it away. Snipes at rote-learning aside, many people simply find it fun to memorize something and then be able to proudly recite it whenever or wherever they choose.
Windelius writes on his 1,000 Club’s World Wide Web site : “(It’s) very stimulating to have something to do when standing at the bus stop, trying to fall asleep, making dinner, or just when you’re in the bathroom.”
“What do you do when you make your dinner?” he asks. “I recite and fry.”
Culinary utility notwithstanding, that still doesn’t explain the appeal of memorizing pi over the more traditional choice of, say, Robert Frost.
What pi lacks in rhyme scheme, however, it more than makes up for in mystery. We romanticize things we don’t understand, and pi easily blurs together with “special relativity,” “chaos theory” and “post-modernism” in that special things-I-meant-to-understand-but-never-got-around-to section of the brain. Ironically, what makes pi even better than these other tricky terms is that nobody understands it — like it or not, it’s just there. Since pi is natural, not man-made, “discovered” rather than “invented,” there’s a certain safety and security in choosing to study it over similarly enigmatic subjects. With pi, no sudden discovery is going to discredit it; no one dare criticize its “author.”
Pi is what is called a transcendental number; not only do its digits go on forever, but any equation for it has an infinite number of terms as well. And truly it transcends our everyday existence. In poring over the digits of pi, one gets a sense at the inscrutable, a fleeting feeling finally for the scope of existence. Pi pops up everywhere, but still its inner workings stump us all — from Pythagoras to Stephen Hawking, with just about every great mind in between.
That very puzzle of pi’s digits rubs every individual a different way: Where some find a meaningless muddle, others uncover a magical marvel. In the end, each potential pi person must make up his or her own mind.
Even 1,000 digits is just an infinitesimal piece of pi, but it’s a piece all the same. Want one? It’s as easy as . . . well, you can probably guess.
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(To access the 1000 Club’s World Wide Web site: www. acc.umu.se/olletg/pi/club 1000.html.)
