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Concept
Piphilology
Summary
Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember many digits of the mathematical constant pi. The word is a play on the word "pi" itself and of the linguistic field of philology.
There are many ways to memorize pi, including the use of piems (a portmanteau, formed by combining pi and poem), which are poems that represent pi in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit. Here is an example of a piem: "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." Notice how the first word has three letters, the second word has one, the third has four, the fourth has one, the fifth has five, and so on. In longer examples, 10-letter words are used to represent the digit zero, and this rule is extended to handle repeated digits in so-called Pilish writing. The short story "Cadaeic Cadenza" records the first 3,834 digits of pi in this manner, and a 10,000-word novel, Not A Wake, has been written accordingly.
However, poems prove to be inefficient for large memorizations of pi. Other methods include remembering patterns in the numbers (for instance, the year 1971 appears in the first fifty digits of pi) and the method of loci (which has been used to memorize pi to 67,890 digits).
Until the 20th century, the number of digits of pi which mathematicians had the stamina to calculate by hand remained in the hundreds, so that memorization of all known digits at the time was possible. In 1949 a computer was used to calculate π to 2,000 places, presenting one of the earliest opportunities for a more difficult challenge.
Later computers calculated pi to extraordinary numbers of digits (2.7 trillion as of August 2010), and people began memorizing more and more of the output. The world record for the number of digits memorized has exploded since the mid-1990s, and it stood at 100,000 as of October 2006. The previous record (83,431) was set by the same person (Akira Haraguchi) on July 2, 2005, and the record previous to that (42,195) was held by Hiroyuki Goto.
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