Posted on 07/02/2005 1:36:04 PM PDT by freespirited
TOKYO - A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday.
Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi — a mathematical value that has an infinite number of decimal places — at a public hall in Chiba city, east of Tokyo, on Friday morning and appeared to give up by noon after only reaching 16,000 decimal places, the Tokyo Shimbun said on its Web site.
But a determined Haraguchi started anew and had broken his old record on Friday evening, about 11 hours after first sitting down to his task, the paper said.
He reached the 80,000-digit mark after midnight early Saturday, according to the paper, which had a photo showing Haraguchi with his eyes closed, his face contorted in concentration.
If verified and recognized by the Guinness Book of Records, Haraguchi's feat would beat his own previous best — currently under review — of 54,000 digits. The official current record-holder, also Japanese, calculated pi from memory to 42,195 decimal places in 1995.
Pi, usually given as an abbreviated 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The number has fascinated and confounded mathematicians for centuries.
Aided by a supercomputer, a University of Tokyo mathematician set the world record for figuring out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places in 2002.
Researchers say that calculating pi to more than about 1,000 decimal places has not much purpose in math or engineering, though mathematicians have done so to test the accuracy and limits of supercomputers.
I'll guess his specialty is obsessive-compulsive disorder.
That is truly impressive.....
Just in time for the Fourth ... a good old-fashioned Pi-reading contest!
I have heard that most people who can remember digits in large quanities, like this gentleman, often relate a specific color to a specific digit. (0-9)
It is something I find facinating.
Not only do the japanese own hot dog eating contests, one Pi reading contests!
3.141592653589793... will do for most practical purposes.
But, as long as he has taken the trouble to go 50,000, might as well keep going.
Wow, and to think I felt special knowing PI to 17 places, rofl. Course, I've only ever known one other person who knew more. He knew it to 65 places.
You know several such on FreeRepublic. It's kind of an e-Mensa.
Just to annoy this guy, I plan to break his record tomorrow.
That's nothing. I can recite the decimal expansion of one ninth to over 1,000,000 places.
Actually 22/7 will do for most purposes, but for really accurate work use 455/113.
Darn, all I can do is "pass gas" to the tune of the National Anthem.
Preliminary calculations indicate that you would have to take a nap before you got 100,000 decimal places on the record. And that is if you can articulate faster than Babs Streisand.
3.1416 will get you to the moon and back.
See? I can remember the decimal version of pi to some extent, but I can't remember that d%$^ fraction. Maybe a face tattoo like the billboard lady, backwards of course so I can see it reflected in the spectacles of the prof.
I do so enjoy trivia.
We had to learn that for life or to get through Engineering 101. It's really handy although was moreso when the car had a 318 rather than the 4.3
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