Saturday, September 25, 2010

Akira Haraguchi

Akira Haraguchi, a retired Japanese engineer, currently working as a mental health counsellor and business consultant in Mobara City, is known for memorizing and reciting digits of Pi.

He set the current world record (100,000 digits) in 16 hours, starting at 9 a.m (16:28 GMT) on October 3, 2006 and having recited up to 83,431 digits by nightfall, 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 views the memorization of Pi as "the religion of the universe", and as an expression of his lifelong quest for eternal truth.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi