Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the black and white video. I accidentally had my camera set for night vision but converted it to black and white because it would have looked bright green, otherwise. Anyway….

Memorizing the digits of pi may seem like a useless activity. But, in general, memorizing is an exercise of the brain and has similarities to exercising your body. We've all heard the old saying, "use it or lose it." Scientific research demonstrates that the same really does apply to our brains. With memorizing pi there is a long-standing fascination with this mysterious and "infinite" number.

There are many reasons why people memorize pi. For me, there is the fun challenge of it but there is also something unique, familiar and meditative about those digits.

In school, I memorized the first 14 digits of pi quite easily as it had a rather poetic ring to it:

3.14 15 92 6535 8979...

Three point one-four, one-five, nine-two,
Six-five, three-five,
Eight-nine, seven-nine

Last year, I memorized the first 100 digits in a couple of days. Recently, just for fun, I wanted to see how hard it would be to memorize 100 digits more. It didn't seem very difficult as the digits somehow grouped together into meaningful sections. It also helped that I found many groups of four digits that had a sort of rhyming poetry to them. In other cases, I found sequences of internal repetition and numbers that had a personal meaning to me. I then created cards that highlighted these features into 100 block sets that I used to memorize pi to 200 digits - which is very Interesting, considering I seem to have a hard time remembering my own phone number. ;o)

3.1415926535897932
38462643383279502
88419716939937510
58209749445923078
16406286208998628
03482534211706798
21480865132823066
47093844609550582
23172535940812848
11174502841027019
38521105559644622
9489549303819

By the way, my favorite pie is the amazing world-famous key lime pie from Blue Heaven in Key West, Florida. Their key lime pies are the perfect combination of creamy, tangy and sweet - piled ridiculously high with a wonderful, light and airy merengue on a perfect graham cracker crust. My husband and I love it so much that we had it as our wedding "cake" when we had our wedding celebration in Key West, and we always enjoy going back to Blue Heaven for more!

The attached photos were taken this past December (2011) at Blue Heaven using an iPhone. (Please click through the tabs above to see the photos.)

Lulis Leal
New York, New York