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Jeffrey Dervicio: It’s pie day.
[CLIP: Theme music]
this is Scientific Americanof science, quickI’m Jeffrey Delvicio.
Well, another 3.141592653589793238462—you get the idea The day has come.
It’s a special day in March when everyone celebrates the irrational numbers represented by the Greek symbol Pi.
In its simplest definition, pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Pi appeared wherever in mathematics. In 1960, the eminent Martin Gardner (then a columnist for The Math Games) quoted mathematician Augustus de He Morgan’s description of pi.
Pi manifests itself outside its circular house in springs and pendulums, probabilities, and 365-day calendar movements. They appear in nature wherever there are circles and spirals, such as planets and DNA. Pi also manifests itself in river bends, especially when winding.
The existence of Pi also led to mass baked goods, pizza discounts, and a memorization contest on March 14th.
Humans have known of pi’s existence for at least the past 4,000 years. However, over the past few hundred years we have been trying to improve the accuracy of our calculations of pi. In 1949, the electronic calculator ENIAC used his 70 machine hours to calculate pi with over 2,000 decimal places. Just last year, Google Cloud calculated that to 100 trillion digits.
And with the race to calculate pi, parallel contest trying to memorize That endless string.
Today is science, quick, Through a song, we talk to someone who created another way to respect and remember the pi number.
Devin Powell is a science writer and multimedia creator. And he joins us today.
Devin Powell: Thanks Jeff.
Dervicio: As a result, humans were able to memorize an incredibly long number sequence of pi. How did you get interested in doing this another way?
Powell: Well, a few years ago I was challenged to one of these Pi memorization competitions. There is no such thing as a world record. I was trying to make it 50 digits. A few years before that, I was covering the World Memory Championships as a reporter. I’ve seen someone memorize a randomly shuffled deck of cards in under 19 seconds. And I spent a lot of time talking about how people have accomplished these seemingly impossible feats of memory.
and i learned that [did not] In summary, certain genetic predispositions for good memory and such are just some tricks of using association to associate one thing with another.
As I approached this Pi memorization competition, I wondered what I could associate these numbers with to make sense to me. And like many children who sang in choirs at an early age, I learned to sing in numbers.
Like do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do from. music sound.
[CLIP: Sound of Music]
Powell: But 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and scaled up. So when I started to sit down with these numbers, I started mapping them to the notes of the scale: 1 to 1, 2 to 2, scaled up.
Dervicio: And when you started doing that, intuitively, when you started looking up numbers, it immediately started to make sense? What did it sound like?
Powell: Yeah, at first it was just a way of remembering, right? I had these tones in my head and it helped me recite these numbers, but when I mapped just the first five digits of him, it sounded great. It sounded like a folk song I used to sing in a choir. Maybe a lullaby. And this nice, kind of… I’m going to sing it here, forgive me….
Dervicio: i will try.
Powell: [laughs] yes. I’ll try. something like: [sings] Three, one four, one five.
Kind of scaled up. So I sat down at the piano and started playing it.
Dervicio: So when you were sitting at the piano, did that make sense? Did it sound like you were gathering here?
Powell: What’s interesting is that if you talk to people who memorize Pi, you can find these patterns when they’re memorizing Pi. They are not unique to mathematics. It’s just your brain picking something up. I was playing this on the piano and started identifying these phrases that sounded really good. So that was kind of the starting point for playing with it. Then I tried major parts, minor parts, and played with chunk placements with different pi ratios.
Dervicio: So what did you call your work?
Powell: [laughs] It’s a little cheesy, but I named it “Lulapi”. In fact, the person who helped me write this a little bit already used it as a lullaby for his kids, so that was nice.
Dervicio: did it work? Did it put the child to sleep?
Powell: He said she likes it.
Dervicio: wonderful. So, just put it in Spotify’s rotation next?
Powell: I think it will be double platinum. Beyoncé will cover it. it’s going to be great. But really, I’m thinking of playing around with it a bit more, orchestrating it with strings and flutes. If there are people who want to play, play instruments or collaborate, we want to expand that.
Dervicio: and before you actually hear Lulapi Overall, did it actually help you remember more numbers than you thought?
Powell: I think it was, and it’s actually a trick I use now. started. And I found that just by composing a simple little song, I was able to recall it five days later.
Dervicio: Maybe I’ll do it in my kid’s school schedule.
Powell: I’m sure you’ll be the coolest dad in school.
Dervicio: Oh yeah, singing in front of my friends in front of the kids makes me totally cool.
Powell: [Laughs]
Dervicio: I’m really looking forward to playing this Lulapi?
Powell: This is the world premiere, yes.
Dervicio: That’s 3 minutes and 14 seconds in total.
[CLIP: Lullapi by Devon Powell plays]
Dervicio: you just heard Lulapi By Devin Powell. Again, thanks for joining us, Devin, happy Pi day.
Powell: Thanks Jeff. Happy pie day.
Dervicio: Scientific American’s Science Quickly is produced by myself, Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, and Kelso Harper. Our theme music is by Dominic Smith. You can subscribe anywhere you can get a podcast. For more science news, visit Scientificamerican.com.
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