Monday, November 27, 2006

Chinese student recites 67,890 pi digits

The 24-year-old took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite to the 67,890th decimal place of pi

A Chinese college student has set a new Guinness world record by reciting almost 68,000 digits of pi or the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter in just over one day.
Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student in Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Shaanxi Province, took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite the 67,890th decimal place of pi without an error.
He achieved his feat on November 19th last year but was only recently confirmed to be the new record holder by the Guinness headquarters in Britain.
The previous Guinness world record was set by a Japanese, who recited pi to the 42,195th decimal place in 1995. “It was Zu Chongzhi, the ancient Chinese mathematician, who discovered the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, and Chinese should win the pi recitation contest,” Lu was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
Lu started learning to recite pi in 2004 and spent more than 10 hours memorising and practicing every day during his summer college vacation last year.
Officials with Lu’s university said he had a very good memory and needed only 10 minutes to memorise a 100-digit number.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting but this is not
the world record, the current world record is 100000.

Anonymous said...

hi,
that's amazing.

i'm trying to beat the australian record which is 4400.

and i know 628 so far and i'm only 11 years old.