The New King of Pi

Back in high-school I had this calculus class, and although I was always savvy with math and numbers, calculus disinterested me to a degree that can only be expressed as 10 to the power of 1000. Whether it was the anal prof, an almost total lack of hot girls in that class (there were a few exceptions), or the fact that I foresaw no real practical application to calculus outside the classroom...what the point of derivatives is, I will never know...who can say? What bothered me though is, there were a few people in that class that I considered not particularly bright, yet they'd get better test scores simply because they sacrificed every night of their lives to study. When they'd flaunt their grades, I'd defend my own intelligence with mathematical trivia. My go-to play was reciting Pi to the 10th decimal place..."3.1415926535" I'd say, and watch them scurry off to their calculators for confirmation, knowing full well that even their calculators would fall a few digits short due to their limited screen size, thus making my triumph that much sweeter.

Pointless and petty you say? Perhaps. But, before you judge me, consider this: a few days ago at the 2006 Mindsports Australia Festival in Sydney, Chris Lyons, 36, won acclaims for reciting Pi to 4,400 digits without an error, smashing my old self-professed, unsubstantiated record by a whopping 4,389 digits! You see, this kind of pointless crap goes on all the time in mathematics under the disguise of "research". I've already explained about calculus, but there are others. Recently researchers at a Missouri university identified the largest known prime number, by programming 700 computers years ago to get the result. The number is apparently 9.1 million digits long. A prime number by the way is any positive number divisible only by 1 and itself. So, who cares? Those computers could have been put to better use, if not for real scientific reasearch, then as supplies for underfunded schools, libraries, and homeless shelters full of folks who cannot afford to surf for porn on their own budgets.

Back to Pi. I wonder who the real king of Pi recitation is? A quick internet search will yield claims as high as 83,431 digits, by Akira Haraguchi, but the sentimental favourite has got to be Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who has stated under oath that he can recite Pi to some 40,000 places. Well in light of this substantiating evidence, I think we have our new Pi King! Still, worthy of acknowledgement is the most obvious disadvantage Apu had to overcome...just imagine how many more digits he could cram into his brain if he could just free up all that memory wasted on the spelling of his own last name? So, anyway, as far as I know I'm currently ranked 4th in the World Pi Recitation rankings, behind Akira, Apu and Chris, with 10 decimal points, but still ahead of those knowing only as far as 3.14, which is a 6-billion-way tie for 5th place.