Akira Haraguchi

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Akira Haraguchi (原口證) (born 1946), a retired Japanese engineer, currently working as a mental health counsellor and business consultant in Mobara City[1], is known for memorizing and reciting digits of Pi.

He set the current world record (100,000 digits) in a straight 16 hours, starting at 9 a.m (16:28 GMT) on October 3, 2006 having recited by night time 83,431 digits, stopping with digit number 100,000 at 1:28 a.m. on October 4, 2006. The event was filmed in a public hall in Kisarazu, east of Tokyo, where he had five-minute breaks every two hours to eat onigiri rice balls to keep up his energy levels. Even his trips to the toilet were filmed to prove that the exercise was legitimate. Haraguchi's previous world record (83,431), was performed from July 1, 2005 to July 2, 2005.

Despite Haraguchi's efforts and detailed documentation, the Guinness World Records have not yet accepted any of his records set, and accredit instead the record to another Japanese man, Hiroyuki Goto, who managed to recite Pi by 42,195 decimal places in 1995.

Haraguchi views the memorisation of Pi as "the religion of the universe",^[1] and as an expression of his lifelong quest for eternal truth.

[edit] Haraguchi's Mnemonic System

Akira Haraguchi uses a system he developed, which assigns Kana symbols to numbers, allowing for the memorization of Pi as a collection of stories. This form of mnemonics had already been known and used by ancient Greeks and Romans.^[2]