TOKYO - A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday.

Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi - a mathematical value that has an infinite number of decimal places - at a public hall in Chiba city, east of Tokyo, on Friday morning and appeared to give up by noon after only reaching 16,000 decimal places, the Tokyo Shimbun said on its Web site.

But a determined Haraguchi started anew and had broken his old record on Friday evening, about 11 hours after first sitting down to his task, the paper said.

 

I wonder if he could have actually done something useful with that talent.

 

Hair Pi???

 

so someone has to sit there and check off the digits as he reads them???

 

Very impressive actually...but what's the point?

 

You'd think with a memory like that this guy could do some damage in vegas.

Instead, he wastes his time spewing Pi for no good reason.

 

The guy that did this is amazing. I saw a special on discovery or history channel about him. He can also do the most complex mathimatical equations in his head. He says that the numbers just come to him through emotions, color and texture. It was a very cool/insightfull special.

Essentially something in his head got cross-wired. He associates certain textures/colors he sees in his head to do the equations, they showed the best they could using animation what he sees in his head to do the math. If you stumble across the show, I highly recomend you watch it.

And he is/has done many usefull things along with other brillant minds behind closed doors.

*edit* I totally fubar'd this, I'm way off subject....the guy I'm talking about was from england I believe. And he did PI to something outragious like 100,000 decimals, it took like 20 hours to do, and it required mutliple people x2 checking his work.