Talk:Piphilology

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piThe Asimov-attributed quote given here seems the most familiar to me, but I found several other versions from googling:

  • How I need a drink, alcoholic (in nature|of course), after the (tough|heavy) (lectures|chapters) involving quantum mechanics.

Anyone know what the original was? And whether it was actually Asimov? Most don't give credit; this one credited Sir James Jeans, this one says 'anonymous', this newsgroup post credits George Polya, and so on. Mostly could be lazy (mis)quoting, but it'd be good for Wikipedia to get it right :-) -- Wapcaplet 04:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

p.s. - our article on George Polya even attributes this quote to him.

I've added another variation to the article, and removed the Asimov attribution until someone can provide a definite source for the quote. -- Wapcaplet 01:55, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

How is zero encoded?

Well, it takes a while until the first zero shows up (33rd decimal digit), and mnemonics aren't that good for memorizing really long sequences (people who get that far have probably already realized that they should use a better method). I suppose you could use a special rule, e.g. a word starting with 'z'. Fredrik | talk 01:00, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)
IMO the most obvious solution is to use ten-letter words.--Army1987 12:44, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] is it really (censored)?

Wikipedia is not supposed to hide questionable content...

I changed the word back . Politeness wins (Paladin 21:19, 23 May 2006 (UTC)).

[edit] years?

I think this article is rather poorly equipped w.r.t. what is available as Pi mnemonics. Also, on the Pi page one reads "Ever since computers have computed billions of digits...", but I can imagine that some of these mnemonics are older than the computation of a billion digits. Is there any information about (approximate) years? — MFH:Talk 18:48, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Numeric rhymes

I added a piece to the English section giving a numeric rhyme for the first 100 digits composed by mathematician John Conway. I hope no one minds. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 134.253.26.10 (talk) 23:00, 7 February 2007 (UTC).

No, that's definitely a worthwhile contribution. It might be worth trying to put it in another format, although I'm not sure whether a table would work all that well. Unfortunately the link doesn't seem to work; could you check it out? –EdC 04:08, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

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The link worked for me. It is a very long page, and you have to search for the sixth occurrence of "Conway." I found another link to conway's original post. I'll use that.
Yes, that works better. Thanks. –EdC 20:23, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] bad link

Does anyone know what became of http://www.cilea.it/~bottoni/www-cilea/F90/piph.htm Andreas P. Hatzipolakis' PiPhilology, said to be a "site with hundreds of examples of mnemonics for π"? Ditto http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/pi/ said to allow one to memorize "1000 digits of pi". Robert Greer (talk) 17:06, 6 March 2008 (UTC)