How to Memorize Pi using Word and Sound Substitutions
How to Memorize Pi using Word and Sound Substitutions
It is said that there are two types of people who memorize pi:
- Scientists, who only need to remember a few digits at most for use when discussing science topics (for any more digits they use a computer and rarely need more than 40).
- Science or math fans who see it as a challenge to remember as many as possible.
There are other learners, too. Some people may be learning the digits of pi as part of a charity fundraising event or as a result of a challenge at school, but whichever group you belong to you will need to choose a technique to memorize pi.
Daniel Tammet is the European record holder for reciting pi from memory – he listed 22,514 digits in just over five hours. He is a savant and describes how each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, color, texture and ‘feel’ in his mind. Here we will be a little less ambitious and describe how to memorize pi using word and sound substitutions in a way good enough for you to retain several hundred digits.
Method
This involves using a language which is known as ‘pilish’. In pilish, a number in pi has an associated word with the corresponding number of letters. This language is used to write out sentences in “pilish. These can be linked to form a piece of prose or a story. There are a number of well-known examples such as:
“May I have a large container of coffee beans” represents 314159265
There is a very well-known example where Mike Keith wrote “Cadaeic Cadenza”. This is a short story of 4,000 words which encoded 3,835 digits of pi. He refined the method further to use words of more than ten letters to represent specific strings of digits. Going even further, he collated this with a series of other items into a book which when worked through sequentially uncovers 10,000 digits of pi.
Writing Prose to Memorize Pi
To memorize pi, you can pick an ‘off the shelf’ piece of prose – such as “Cadaeic Cadenza” – or you can write your own, though it has to be said that this latter approach can be quite challenging. Then all you have to do to memorize pi is to memorize the story. When reciting the digits of pi using this method, you have to visualize the word and translate it to a number. That puts an extra step into the retrieval process for each digit.
This technique is aligned to that of ‘piems’ – the poetic equivalent. Just as most writers would say that poetry and prose are as unalike as chalk and cheese so it is with piems and prose written in pilish. Prose can by quoted almost continuously, but poetry has both horizontal vertical structural dimensions which gives even more opportunity for encoding the digits of pi. Therefore, ‘piems’ is the subject of a separate article on the techniques for memorizing pi.
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