Currently the world record is 67890 digits, held by Lu Chao. According to some sources Akira Haraguchi has recited 100000 digits of PI, however the Guiness World Records have not accepted his record (Wikipedia).

Memorising PI is rather fun and is a great mental exercise. The PI day was just 5 days ago (14th of March), so it’s a great occasion to start memorising.

The technique

Different people use different techniques to help them memorise PI, because each of us learns things a bit differently. There are three different learning styles: Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic, thus different techniques will work for different learning styles. So you may find assigning numbers to musical notes, images or poems more effective.

The idea of the technique I used is to divide PI into small blocks of numbers, which makes it easier to memorise. Divide and conquer!

PI to 100 digits is: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

  • Start by copying the whole number into any text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word, Notepad, Google Docs)
  • Read through the digits. You should naturally start grouping them into blocks. Whenever you form a new block put spaces on both sides of the block to separate it from other blocks.

Blocks may not be obvious at first, but once you start trying to memorise them, they should become much clearer.

In the end, you should have something like this:

  1. 1415 92 6535 8979 323 84626 433 83 279 50288 4197 169399 37510 5820 9749 4459 230 781 640 628 620 8998 628 034 825 342 117 0679

As you can see, the blocks I’ve chosen range from 2 to 6 digits in length. Yours may or may not differ - see for yourself what works for you.

Now take blocks one by one and try to memorize them in order .

I found memorising a few blocks at a time easier. By the way, sheer repetition really helps, though it probably wouldn’t work on longer sequences.

Useful resources

  • Assigning digits to notes by Vihart - Youtube link
  • Link and Major systems - Link
  • Phonetic System - Link