Number Wizards

• Posted by sreejith s April 6, 2015 - Filed in Other - #numbers  #number wizards  #memorization  - 2,455 views

       When something interests you, like the history of a family or some story or movie dialogue. It is easier to memorize than some boring, meaningless abstractions. That is why you find it easier to pick up the words of songs, pop tunes, than a list of numbers. But the numbers bit can still be done.
         For example take π, PI. Most of us have come across this symbol in school and college. Pi is the ratio between the circumference of a circle. As a fraction it is close enough to 22/7. But try turning it into a decimal and it goes on for ever. Most people call it 3.1416 and if that is not good enough, they grab a computer.
         There are people who do not like computers. One of these was Prof. A.C. Aitken of Edinburgh University. It sounds funny, but he memorized Pi to the first thousand decimal places! You would have imagined that was one record nobody would want to beat, but since Prof. Aitken’s death, the Japanese Hideaki Tomoyori has committed the first ten thousand decimal places to memory.
        Feats like these do not necessarily require years of study and effort. The Yogi Shaa, who lived in Mumbai, could memorize any poem, up to a thousand phrases, in any language after listening to it only once.