March 14, 2006

"How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!"

Just the beginning of a mnemonic device for remembering a sequence of pi digits, that is, a little piphilology. It is pi day, you know.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 6:13 PM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Only a woos needs a mnemonic device to remember pi. I know the first 50 digits by heart and can recite them in less than 8 seconds.

3/14/06, 9:09 PM
Eli Blake said...

True story:

I was learning pi at the rate of a digit a day, from a book in the library when I was in high school (the book had it written out to a thousand digits). I'd gotten to sixty digits. But I made a mistake. I showed it to a friend of mine who was a burgeoning capitalist, and he checked out the book and offered to sell it to me for a nickel a digit. Refusing to submit to such classless blackmail, that was the end of my memorizing pi.

It was such an 'irrational' thing to do, anyway.

3/15/06, 2:05 AM

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