Piphology

I am finding it near impossible to research on this subject. Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember a span of digits of the mathematical constant π. The word is a play on Pi itself and the linguistic field of philology. Even before computers calculated π, memorizing a record number of digits became an obsession for some people.


There are many ways to memorize π, including the use of piems (a portmanteau, formed by combining pi and poem), which are poems that represent π in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit. Here is an example of a piem: How I need a drink, alcoholic of course [or, in nature] after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. Notice how the first word has 3 letters, the second word has 1, the third has 4, the fourth has 1, the fifth has 5, and so on. The Cadaeic Cadenza contains the first 3834 digits of π in this manner. However, piems prove inefficient for large memorizations of pi. Other methods include remembering patterns in the numbers (for instance, the year 1971 appears in the first fifty digits of pi) and the method of loci (used to memorize π to 65,536 digits).


So in theory these techniques would be useful for memorizing pin numbers, phone numbers and other codes that dominate our lives.