The Pi-Memorization ‘Controversy’ !?
That’s right. There appears to be a controversy of sorts around – of all things! – who has memorized the most digits in the decimal expansion of pi !
If you go by the official Guinness Book of World Records, the record is over 70,000 digits, set in March of this year!! It took over 10 hours to recite the digits! For more details see GuinnessPi.
On the other hand, a Japanese man named Akira Haraguchi appears to have bettered this number TWICE (at least) and has witnesses to verify most of his attempts. He has recited digits to over 50,000 places on four separate occasions, and his record is over 100,000 digits (taking 16 hours)! It is not clear why Guinness will not recognize his attempts. For more details, including the Guinness ‘controversy’, see HaraguchiPi.
I’ve only recently learned of these discrepancies, and I hope to discover more soon. Either way, it is clear that such memorization efforts are mind-boggling!! (I once memorized pi to 50 places in my grad school days – now I can’t even keep track of my cell phone!)