In the port city of Mangalore, Karnataka, on July 5, a hushed audience listened to a gangling young man reel off a series of numbers - 31,812 of them. Rajan Mahadevan, 23, took three hours to recite the value of Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to 
31,811 decimal places.
The feat is all the more astonishing because the average man can memorise Pi only up to twenty or so decimal places: the number is difficult to commit to memory because the numerals do not follow any pattern.
With that marathon performance in Mangalore,
The feat is all the more astonishing because the average man can memorise Pi only up to twenty or so decimal places: the number is difficult to commit to memory because the numerals do not follow any pattern.
With that marathon performance in Mangalore,
Rajan broke the existing world memory record held by Creighton Carvello of Cleveland, United Kingdom, who recited Pi to 20,013 decimal places in nine hours and 10 minutes on June 27, 1980, and earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, 1981.
For all his mental prowess
For all his mental prowess
Rajan's academic career wasn't exactly brilliant. He seems to have been a less than average student at school and, after doing disastrously in his second year in engineering college, Rajan quit studies and stayed home for two years.
Alarmed by their son's failures, his parents
Alarmed by their son's failures, his parents
took him to a Kerala yogi who put him through an intensive three-month course in meditation, which, says Rajan, "helped to calm me and to improve my memory".
Mahadevan holds the position of Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches courses in
Mahadevan holds the position of Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Tennessee, where he teaches courses in
learning and thinking as well as cognitive psychology
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
