Haryana Engineer beats Japanese by memorising 'Pi' to 43,000 digits

Chandigarh, July 26 (UNI) An engineer from Haryana claims to have broken the over a decade-old Guinness World record by Japan's Hiroyuki Goto and set a new world record by recalling the value of 'pi' to 43,000 digits.

It took Krishan Kumar Chahal five hours and 21 minutes to recite error-free the mathematical constant 'Pi' (3.141....) upto 43,000 digits after decimal in front of the Limca Book officials in New Delhi on June 19, 2006. He also bettered his own record set earlier this year.

Mr Chahal told reporters here today that with his feat, he had broken the record set in 1995 by Mr Hiroyuki Goto, who had memorised the value of pi to nearly 42,200 digits.

The Greek letter pi, representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter which is used to find the area of a circle, is usually written as ''3.141...'', meaning that the expansion continues to infinity and is considered the toughest to commit to memory record, Mr Chahal said.

Mr Chahal, a mechanical engineer, said he used his own unique ''grid memory improvement method'' to memorise the pi. The method uses one piece of information that is not associated only with the next but also with other pieces of information coming in a sequence, coupled with all the five senses of hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell.

Pi is a non-repeating number and does not possess any kind of sequential relation between its numbers. It is used to test the processing speed of algorithms on computers, Chahal said.

Mr Chahal is already holding two national memory records in Lima Book of Records by memorising a deck of 52 playing cards in 85 seconds in March 2004 and reciting 33,000 digits of pi after decimal on March 13,2006.

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