The piHunters

I still remember my good ol’ school days where my corpulent mathematics teacher used to ask the class,” What is the value of pi ?“ ,and I knew straightaway that this was more of a rhetorical question than a question meant to gauge our knowledge. How come?

Teacher: what is the value of pi?

Student (rising from his slumber):ummm well sir it is 3.14

Teacher : Do anyone know the value any further

Another student : yes sir it is 3.1415

Teacher( using sarcasm): huh ! you all are dumb . It is 3.1415926535897932384

Whole class(in chorus) : woooooooo!!!!!

This had become a humdrum routine ,everyday the teacher use to ask the same question and then tell the value correct upto 20 decimal places. I had learnt in my biology class that it is neurons that are responsible for storing the information in our brain and there are 90k of them . I used to think that the teacher must have more of them UNTILL I met Krishan chahal , a dude from karnal who holds the world record of memorizing the value of pi upto 43000 decimal places !! Jesus Christ!! What could be the no. of neurons in his cerebra ?

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060728/ttlife.htm#8

We had a casual meeting and i had in mind to test his skills and this is how our conversation went :-

Krishan : write 100 digits on a paper and speak each of them while you write.

I : 22 34 55 6666 77 88 ……………………….344 55 66 773 8 (100 digits).

Krishan: Fine. now I will speak all the digits in order.

Voila ! He did.

I : wow !

Krishan : Ok now I will speak them in reverse order

Again done with no error.

I: speechless

Krishan; now tell me one thing

I: yes

Krishan: Do u want me to store these digits in my memory or not. if yes then even after 5 years I would be able to recall the sequence. If u don’t want I wont be able to recall them even after 5 minutes.

I: (fell off my chair) ;-)