The number pi (p) begins with  3.1415926   But that's just the beginning....

For centuries, pi has been the classic long-digit number to memorize.  Some people can just do it, but they can't seem to explain how, or teach anyone else to do it.  With Pseudonumerology, anyone who wants to can do it.  Memorizing pi is pretty useless - like climbing the outside wall of a tall building.  Nobody would climb a building for the view, or the exercize, but   "...because it's there."  Someone might do it to see if he can, or to show that he can.  He might do it to show that he has a good climbing technique.

For a research demonstration in Trondheim, Norway on September 30, 1999, I actually memorized the first 1000 digits of pi.  (And my memory is nothing to brag about!)  I did it to demonstrate my Pocket Pseudonumer^®, and to test it.   It took about 20 hours to do it – an hour or so each day for a few weeks – including writing down the pseudonumes and memorizing them as a phantasmagoria, or series of visual images.  For the first 500 digits of pi, I used the Norwegian version of the Pocket Pseudonumer to find pseudonumes.  When this Pseudonumer^® was just about used up, so I continued by using the English version, the Pocket Pseudonumer^®, and then the Ponderous Pseudonumer^®.  I remembered this 1000-digit number for several weeks, but don't remember more than the first 50 or so digits now (I refresh this much once in a while).  But since I now have the list of pseudonumes that I used, I could refresh my memory of the whole thing again in just a few hours.   This is like climbing a building and leaving your rope and pitons along the way:  it is much quicker to climb the second time!

Memorizing this phantasmagoria taught me something about how the brain and memory work.  The memory is like a strong magnet:  pieces of iron stick easily (as pictures stick in the memory) but you will be continually frustrated if you try to stick pieces of aluminum to it (numbers don't stick in the memory).  And if you want to be able to pull the pieces of iron off the magnet in a specific order, you need to tie strings from one piece of iron to the next, before you put the pieces on the magnet.  Then you can pull off as long a string of iron pieces as you like!

If you want to memorize some of pi, a phantasmagoria of pseudonumes for the first 500 decimals of pi is written here.

(If you just landed on this page from the internet, and don't yet know what a pseudonume is, you need to go to the beginning of this web site and read a bit about Pseudonumerology.  You must know the pseudonumerals and how to pseudospell, but this can be learned quickly.

Pseudonumerals:	S	T	N	M	R	L	J	K	F	P
Arabic numerals:	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Here is the list of the first 500 numbers:

500 digits of pi, written as 50 digits in each row:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751
05820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067
98214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812
84811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819
64428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909
14564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127
37245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643
67892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609
43305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854
80744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491

Below is a phantasmagoria of pseudonumes for these numbers.  The pseudonumes were found in the Ponderous Pseudonumer^®.   You might be surprised at how many of these digits you can memorize in 15 minutes.  The whole thing shouldn't take more than a few hours.  Simply read a line, then close your eyes and see the silly images in your mind, to help you remember the pseudonumes.

Good advice for climbing a building is:   "Don't look down – just take one step at a time!"
Good advice for memorizing pi would be:   "Don't look ahead – just take one pseudonume at a time!")