Use this to impress your friends by recalling the nth digit of Pi where n < 100
It took me four days I think, 5 words a day, and got me some beer money from my maths teacher.
Only slight relevance to HN because I'd like to think that its a cool way to hack number memory.
It works by sorting the 10 digits 0-9 by number of occurrences in the first 100 digits of Pi, and then associating each digit with the corresponding top n most commonly used letter of the English language (eg. the letter "E" is the most common English letter).
I don't know about English, but in Japanese digits can be pronounced in several ways and many of them are short (e.g. 1 = "hi", "i", "in" or "hito", 2 = "ni", "nin", "fu", "bu", "pu" or "futa", etc), so it's typical to compose a meaningful phrase or sentence to memorize various numbers (e.g. phone numbers).
Remembering pi is a popular game among nerdy kids; I can still recite 200 digits I remembered back in elementary school. Several friends of mime can do 100-800 digits.
For those who can read Japanese, this is one of old ways to remember first 40 digits or so. For 100 digits or more you usually need to come up your own mnemonics:
Roughly translates to: An obstetrician goes abroad. Postpartum is without problem. The new mother is to visit a shrine. Crickets are chirping in darkness. Do not hurry to visit.
It took me four days I think, 5 words a day, and got me some beer money from my maths teacher.
Only slight relevance to HN because I'd like to think that its a cool way to hack number memory.
It works by sorting the 10 digits 0-9 by number of occurrences in the first 100 digits of Pi, and then associating each digit with the corresponding top n most commonly used letter of the English language (eg. the letter "E" is the most common English letter).