Hello My Socratica Friends!
We’re here to help you be a GREAT student.
If you’ve studied math at ALL, you’ve met our little buddy pi.
I first met him as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
But he REALLY gets around.
Kepler’s Third Law...Coulomb’s Law...Einstein’s Field Equations...the Uncertainty Principle...believe
me, he’s GOING to show up in your life one of these days, if he hasn’t already.
If we need to look up pi, we do all have calculators or phones we can use.
But at some point, in your career as a student, you’re going to want to be able to write
down some digits of pi from memory.
In fact, depending on the company you keep, you may find yourself in need of a LOT of pi.
As many digits as you can remember.
There are even contests for this kind of thing.
Now, this is something we do for fun at Socratica.
We even made a phone app to practice how many digits of pi we could learn.
It’s really good for bragging rights, like, SERIOUS nerd cred.
But there’s a more substantial reason to learn pi.
It’s another way to EXERCISE your brain.
Use it, or lose it.
So today, we’re going to talk about MEMORIZING pi.
We’ll discuss 3 popular techniques.
Chunking, visualization, and making cryptographic sentences.
Ready?
Technique #1 takes advantage of your brain’s fondness for anything close to a song.
I like to call it the SingSong Principle.
Ever notice that certain phone numbers sound like they’re easy to remember?
818 - 555 -1212.
Your brain just loves to find patterns of numbers that sound nice like that.
So when we look at pi, we’re going to break it into CHUNKS that are appealing to us.
Some people might tell you to memorize pi 5 digits at a time, but that would mean you
lose the really appealing patterns.
Let’s take a look, and you’ll see what I mean.
3.1415 That’s how much of pi I used in school.
So I don’t have to work to memorize that part, I already know it.
But what comes next?
926 -- I can’t explain why, these three digits just feel right together, like the
start of a phone number.
535 -- that one’s really nice because it begins and ends with the same number.
8979 -- that’s a nice sing-song group of numbers..
8979 ..8979...things like that really get stuck in your head
323 -- there’s another one that starts and ends in the same number
84 -- It was a great year for movies.
Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Amadeus, Terminator, Karate Kid, Gremlins...oh, and there was that
book that Orwell wrote, so, you know.
‘84.
Very memorable.
626 -- the Fung brothers have a great song about living in the 626...
Mmmm. dumplings.
So you can see that this first technique works by CHUNKING the digits of pi into memorable
groups, sort of like memorizing a bunch of phone numbers.
Technique #2 involves visualizing a story that goes along with the digits of pi.
Each of the digits rhymes with a large number of words, but not with each other, so we can
take advantage of that and paint ourselves a mental picture.
Let’s try it for a few digits.
3.1415926 Let’s write the words for the numbers out.
Three...
Point ... One...
Four...
One...
Five...
Nine...
Two...
Six
Now, let’s write words that rhyme with these numbers, that we can build into a story.
Tree...Sun...More...Run...Alive...Fine...Shoe...Sticks
OK.
Here’s our story.
You and a friend are sitting under a TREE.
He POINTS at the burning SUN and says No MORE!
RUN!
If you want to stay ALIVE!
You say, I’m FINE.
Besides, My SHOE is full of STICKS.
Technique #3 is going to appeal to you if you enjoy codes and ciphers.
It’s a kind of phonetic substitution cipher, where you substitute SOUNDS for each number.
We’ve heard this technique from a number of sources, but we think we’ve traced it
back to the book “Secrets of Mental Math” by Arthur Benjamin and Michael Shermer.
We’ll include a link to this book in the description of the video.
The first step of this technique involves memorizing a phonetic alphabet for the numbers
0 through 9.
0 is the S or Z sound.
1 is the T, D, or Th sound.
2 is the N sound 3 is the M sound
4 is the R sound 5 is the L sound
6 is J , Ch, Sh, or soft G like geranium.
7 is the K sound, and the hard G like Go.
8 is the F, V, or W sound.
9 is the P or B sound
It will take you a little while to memorize this list, but once you do, you can start
converting numbers into words.
You can put in any vowels you want between the consonant sounds, so you can make any
number of words.
Let’s start applying this to pi.
My turtle Pancho, will, my love, pick up my new mover Ginger.
My movie monkey plays in a favorite bucket.
Ship my puppy Michael to Sullivan’s back rubber.
A really open music video cheers Jenny F. Jones.
Have a baby fish knife so Marvin will marinate the goose chick.
I know, I know, These sentences do make you sound a little bit crazy.
Crazy like a FOX, you just memorized 100 digits of Pi!
Don’t believe me? Watch.
{Reading out 100 digits of pi}
I hope you’re impressed with yourself.
Your brain is capable of INCREDIBLE feats of strength, if you keep exercising.
And when your brain is in good shape, you can apply these techniques to all kinds of
tasks, not just specifically pi.
Think of memorizing pi as a gym workout for your brain.
If you’d like to test yourself, you can use our FREE phone app, available for Android
on the Google Play store.
Say hi to my buddy pi.
I know, he’s a little irrational at times.
But he sure does come in handy.
Being on familiar terms with pi is an important part of being a GREAT student.
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