Mouthful of Pi

"The world's made up of numbers!"

"I could go to Vegas. Learn to play Black Jack. Memorize four hundred fifty-two consecutive digits of pi, a few hundred measly cards are easy."

— Winifred "Fred" Burkle, Angel

A quick way to show that a character is a genius is to have him recite pi to an absurd number of places. With its endless parade of decimal digits, π has both mystique and geek cred — it has its own holiday, it's splashed across mugs and T-shirts, calculating 1–10 millions of digits of π is a very common way of testing your CPU's power, and it's honored by movies and songs. Most of us never memorize it past a few places, so anyone who can fire off a hundred surely must be a genius, right?

For the record, odds are that your computer "knows" pi to the nearest multiple of 2^-52, about 2.168×10^-15, so about fifteen reliable digits. Ditto for e. You can compute it much more precisely, but you'll need to make your own storage.

The truth is, only a handful of digits are needed for most applications — only 11 decimal places are needed to calculate the circumference of the Earth to a millimeter,^note and due to the effects of General Relativity, you would get the wrong answer anyway while only 42 are needed to find the circumference of a circle the size of the entire universe to within less than the diameter of a single proton. There's not much point in memorizing a hundred places other than to show off. (And indeed, after that many digits you can use whatever wrong digits you want because the math will still be pretty darn close — though you'll have a lot of mathematicians gritting their teeth…) For obvious reasons, this is a go-to Overly Long Gag. For reference, here's a handy guide,◊ and another.

On the other hand, some people really do just enjoy the challenge of memorization, the same way a theater geek might memorize scenes from Shakespeare or a Trekker entire scenes from their favorite episode, and they do it for personal satisfaction rather than any desire to show up anyone else; any feelings of inadequacy are the responsibility of those who feel them, not the math geek's.

Perhaps the reason Reed Richards Is Useless is because he spends his time memorizing numbers he'll never use. It's also a common attribute of the Absent-Minded Professor and the TV Genius, as the contrast is a wonderful thing to show or rant about.

Inversely, a quick way to show that a character is stupid is to have him not know what pi is at all: "Apple or cherry?"

Compare Calculus Is Arcane Knowledge.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei had a kid recite the first few digits of pi...and get excessively hyped for this feat.
• Kyon of Haruhi Suzumiya supposes that the Intergrated Data Entity is smart enough that it "could calculate pi to the hundred millionth decimal point in just two seconds and do all sorts of advanced tricks."
• The first episode of Hell Girl: The Cauldron of Three had Enma Ai ask the person she was taking to hell (a teacher) to recite pi while ferrying him there.
• In The Prince of Tennis, one of Sadaharu Inui's Image Songs has him reciting pi.
• In the third episode of Angel Beats!, after Noda questions Takeyama's usefulness, Takeyama literally drives him into submission by reciting hundreds of digits of pi.
• Subverted in a Fourth-Wall Mail Slot omake of Eyeshield 21, a reader asked how many digits of pi Hiruma can memorize. He replied, "3.14. If you need more than that, go check it from a book or something." The team mascot commented that he's the kind of guy who doesn't remember useless trivial stuffs.
• In Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, Queen Claris (as Sherlock) only needs to get as far as "3.14" to convince the others that she's not Sherlock.
• Ichika from Infinite Stratos recites Pi in his mind to force him to get his mind off the naked Charlotte who's changing right next to him after she dragged him into a changing room both to hide from some girls and to show him her outfit. It largely works as he enters a mantra and seems to be determined to recite the numbers.
• Manabe does this in episode 7 of Kotoura-san in an attempt to prevent Haruka from finding out what he may or may not be up to.
• In the manga Fate/EXTRA CCC Fox Tail, Saber/Suzuka Gozen starts bragging about her intelligence. Caster/Tamamo no Mae dares her to prove it by reciting the exact value of pi. Suzuka says she's not going to fall for that because pi has an infinite number of digits. Leo and Rani comment they have memorized pi to the 100th decimal, which shocks Hakuno.
• In Digimon Adventure: (2020), on episode 38, Joe Kido recites a bunch of things, including the first 41 digits of pi, to.....combat Mephistomon's mind control chant on some mook Digimon. Somehow, it works.
• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: In Nano Eiai's introduction, after falling in love with Rentarou and realizing that it's distracting her from studying, she starts writing down an absurd number of pi's digits on her board to stay focused. When it runs out of space, she starts writing them on paper and plastering them over her room before giving up.

Comic Books

• Discussed Trope in a The Cartoon History of the Universe footnote — the author believes that the accuracy of Pi is a pretty good indicator of a civilization's general mathematical/scientific ability. He then goes on to point out that The Bible specifies that the dimensions of the bronze basin for the Temple should be 10 cubits across, and 30 cubits around, putting the value of Pi at exactly three.
  Solomon: And now you know why I hired outside contractors as the architects!

Comic Strips

• Foxtrot:
  • One strip had Jason Fox reciting enough digits of pi to fill several panels after Paige asks him what it is. In the last panel, implied to take place hours later with Jason still reciting, she exclaims, "Mother, how is this MY fault?"
  • Another strip had a scene at a nerd camp that Jason and Marcus were attending. When a kid is late for Roll Call, the counselor tells him to do a pushup and recite pi to thirty places.
  • Another strip involved hiking the football on the count of pi. Naturally, they never got around to actually hiking the ball.
• In Monty, when Robotman disappears, he is replaced by an alien-human hybrid whose full name is 3.1415..., but his friends call him Mr Pi. Because the name was given to him as an insult he later changes it to Dave.
• A mostly forgotten character in Peanuts was 5, a kid whose family had numbers instead of names. In one strip where he appeared, Linus asked Charlie Brown what sort of name he'd like if that were the case with everyone:
  Charlie Brown: How about 3.14159?
  Linus: I don't know, Charlie Brown... I have a feeling that every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be called 3.14159!
• In Pearls Before Swine, Goat tries to recite pi as a pickup line. It doesn't work.

Fan Works

• Mentioned as a subversion in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter nine, to lampshade Harry's broader intellect as compared to Hermione's Book Smarts. Harry knows pi down to six decimals because that's accurate enough for most practical purposes. Hermione knows a hundred decimals because that was what was printed in her math textbook.

Films — Animated

• In Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Teen Genius Ed sings a little song that involves reciting pi. (With a few wrong numbers!)

Films — Live-Action

• This is the motif of Darren Aronofsky's film π. The protagonist is a Mad Mathematician who seems to discover a 216-digit number that holds the Meaning of Life. In the climax of the film, he recites the numbers while having a breakdown. Ironically, the actual number pi appears nowhere in the movie except the opening credits. (The credits show pi to many decimal places, but only the first 8 digits after the decimal point are correct.)
• In Never Been Kissed, the Denominators put on a bake sale with a banner reading: "Pie = $1.00. Pi = 3.1457869986". Only the first two digits after that decimal point are correct, the rest is gibberish.
• In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Larry and Amelia have to solve a riddle to which the answer is Pi (something about the heart of the tomb of the pharaoh). They were helped by Bobblehead Einsteins, who proceed to tell them the (supposedly) correct combination. Larry constantly mixes them up, but Amelia remembers the numbers correctly. Apparently pi is less than ten digits long.
• In The Film of the Book Life of Pi, the title character writes it to a ludicrous length while introducing himself in elementary school. He does this to hopefully impress the kids enough so they would stop intentionally mispronouncing his actual name, Piscine, as "pissing". It works. From that day on, he's just "Pi".
• Thai exam cheating heist movie Bad Genius has one of the characters rattling off digits of Pi as establishing moment of his intelligence and rivalry with main character Lynn, another straight-A student.
• Subverted in Spanish comedy film Toc Toc. One of the characters has a very bad case of arithmomania but when asked about Pi he just says "3.1416" (although he lampshades that he is refraining himself)

Literature

• In The Ancestral Trail, Richard defeats Madelbiot by asking him "What is the complete value of pi?"
• Discworld:
  • The numbers-obsessed Mr. Bent from Making Money mentions that he'd mastered all the numbers except pi, but was working on it in his spare time and was sure it would give in sooner or later.
  • Inverted in Moist's previous adventure, Going Postal. The Post Office's old sorting engine was designed by the infamous Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson, who decided that pi was untidy, what with all that "never ending" nonsense, and therefore designed the crucial cog of the engine to have a pi that was exactly 3. This required or resulted in the machine containing a small part of the universe where pi does equal 3, causing some kind of rupture in space-time so that the machine started to spit out letters that hadn't been written yet, and then letters that would have gotten written if the writer hadn't written a different letter instead, and then letters that would never have been written in this particular leg of the Trousers of Time but were starting to bleed over from other legs because the engine was hurting for things to sort.
• In one of the books in Bryan Davis' Dragons in Our Midst series, part-dragon genius Ashley has to verbally calculate the square root of pi out to a certain number of digits as a passcode for her own (artificially intelligent, talking, almost-as-smart-as-her) computer.
• In the novel version of Carl Sagan's Contact it is discovered that at a particular distant point of the base 11 expression of pi a long sequence of 0 and 1's occurs that forms a bitmap of a circle. (Incidentally, pi is believed to be a normal number, which means that any sequence of numbers will eventually occur, with a frequency that corresponds to its random probability.)
• Cadaeic Cadenza, a pi mnemonic taken to 14 chapters and 3835 digits, containing "Pilish" imitations of The Raven, Hamlet, etc. And then the author went even further with Not A Wake, which encodes over ten thousand digits.
• Colin from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green memorized the first 99 digits of pi when he was ten by making up a 99-word sentence in which the first letter of each word corresponds to a digit of pi (a=1, b=2, etc.). (A well-known Real Life rhyme in which the lengths of the words correspond to pi to the first ten places is "See, I have a rhyme assisting my feeble brain, its tasks ofttimes resisting.")
• Bree from jPod did a grade-school report on pi and wound up becoming slightly freakishly obsessed with it.
• In Anathem, chapter four of "The Book" consists of a large number of digits of pi, which avout are expected to memorize as a punishment.
• In Cryptonomicon, Enoch Root says that where he grew up, memorising the digits of Pi was as close as they got to entertainment.
  • Of course, when Enoch was a boy, the value of pi was known to fewer than 40 digits...possibly a lot fewer, since we don't know how old he really is.
• Two characters in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs engage in what the narrator calls a "pi fight".
• The title character from Life of Pi earns his nickname by being able to recite over two whole blackboards worth of digits in front of the classroom. He did this because his full name is Piscine, which sounds a lot like "pissing", and he wanted to get a different nickname before his classmates made that connection.
• In one of the Time Warp Trio books, the main characters Logic Bomb a security robot that demands their ID numbers (which they don't have) by telling it that their numbers are three different irrational numbers, one of which is pi. The robot's attempts to calculate the exact decimal values of these numbers cause it to self-destruct.
• David from What to Say Next recites hundreds of digits of pi to calm himself when he's stressed out.
• Early from Navigating Early has not only memorized hundreds of digits of pi, but sees each number as having color and texture. To him, the numbers tell a story about Polaris, the first navigator, who leaves his home to prove himself worthy of his name.
• Wild Orchid: In The White Bicycle, Taylor becomes upset and starts to deal with it in her usual way: by obsessively cleaning. She's been trying to break that habit, so instead she writes in her journal to distract herself. The only thing that works is typing dozens of digits of pi.

Live-Action TV

• Aibou - a murdered genius mathematician leaves behind a series of apparent nonsense words that actually form a mnemonic for the first several digits of pi as a Dying Message.
• As noted in the page quote, Fred from Angel has memorized 452 digits of pi. In the same scene the quote comes from, she scares away a homeless guy by reciting it.
• In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Thanksgiving Decoupling", a drunken Sheldon shows off by burping pi. We only hear him get to "...23846", which would be the twenty-first place.
• On the game show The Big Moment one player had to memorize Pi to 100 decimal places.
• An episode of Clarissa Explains It All featured the title character and her brother on a game show, where he blows the question "What is pi?" with the standard flavors-of-pi mistake. Since he prides himself on being a child prodigy and hates when people prove he's not, this sends him into a period of stunned shock...from which he resurfaces in time to interrupt his sister and prevent her from winning them the game.
• Happens in Cutie Honey: THE LIVE to show that Honey Kisaragi/Cutey Honey and Miki Saotome/Sister Miki are not normal.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Five Doctors", the correct path across a trapped chessboard is based on pi... somehow. The Master has it memorized well enough to dance across the chessboard, and the First Doctor knows enough to get himself and Tegan across.
  • The Doctor reels off the square root of pi to thirty decimal places^note 1.772453850905516027298167483341 in "Midnight". And the possessed woman who's copying everything he says recites it too. At the same time. Out of sync by several digits. By now everyone's realized that something is very wrong with the woman, but it's at this point when they start getting suspicious of the Doctor, too. Completely Played for Drama.
• Walter from Fringe recited pi to 101 places to help him sleep. And the code to a combination lock on his old garage is 314159. And in "The Plateau", video of a mentally impaired man who's been made intelligent by an experimental drug trial show him reciting the digits of pi to 1000 decimal places while solving differential equations in his head.
• The Genius: this reality game show presents challenges based on math and memorization. When Pi digits sequence eventually pops up as way to win the game there is a contestant who have committed 100 first digits of Pi to memory. "For fun".
• The Librarians: In "And the Apple of Discord", Flynn attempts to Logic Bomb the Apple-influenced Cassandra by asking her the last digit of pi, but Cassandra simply scoffs at the attempt. Jacob has better success when he brings up Euler's number instead (and claims the last digit is 6).
• In the first episode of Malcolm in the Middle, on Malcolm's first day in the gifted class, Eraserhead challenges him to recite π to 50 places. Malcolm shoos him away.
• Person of Interest. In the episode "2-Pi-R", Harold Finch is posing as a substitute teacher and on finding that Everybody Hates Mathematics gives them an inspiring speech about how all of the world’s infinite possibilities are contained within the mathematical constant Pi. Later Finch, who is paranoid about hiding his identity, tells a Teen Genius that his phone number is contained somewhere in the first 3000 digits of Pi to challenge him to find it. In later episodes Team Machine is shown using Pi as a combination code.
• Psych: In "Mr. Yin Presents," Shawn and Gus find pi written out to several digits along the tops of the walls in Mary's apartment.
• In Sliders episode Eggheads, Quinn Mallory recites pi to 13 places while playing a full-contact trivia/ball game on a giant Othello board.
• On Stargate Atlantis, Rodney tracked his memory loss by reciting pi to twelve places every so often.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold", Spock Logic Bombs a villain who's taken over the Enterprise's computer by instructing it to "compute to the last decimal place the value of pi".

Magazines

• In MAD's "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", halavah (used to define the unit of mass) is described as a form of pie whose specific gravity is 3.1416 and specific heat is .31416.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic's "White & Nerdy" - "My myspace page is so totally pimped out/ Got people beggin' for my top 8 spaces/ Yo, I know pi to a thousand places/ Ain't got no grills, but I still wear braces..."
• Kate Bush wrote a song called "π", about a mathematician who's fascinated with the number, and some verses consist of her singing a few hundred digits.
• The Hard N Phirm song linked above is really more a parody of this.
• Songs to Wear Pants To once wrote a song to serve as a mnemonic for the first 50 digits of pi. Just count the letters in each word:
  Man, I can't — I shan't — formulate an anthem where the words comprise mnemonics, dreaded mnemonics for pi. The numerals just bother me always, even the dry anterior. Try to request something lower (zero) in numerary aptitude. Even I, pantaloon gallant, I cannot actualize the requested mnemonics, the leading fifty, I...
• No points for guessing what famous song Public Enema used as the framework for their musical mnemonic unofficially titled "Mathematical Pi." Memorize the chorus and play along with Mouthful of Pi at home today!
• The rhyme "Secant, tangent, cosine, sine/Three point one four one five nine" appears in football chants/cheers at particularly nerdy colleges.
• This cover of "Ren'ai Circulation" is basically just a Kana Hanazawa sound-alike singing the first 400 or so digits of pi.

Tabletop Games

• In the Netrunner collectible card game there exists a card "PI in the 'Face"; its cover art includes a decimal expansion of the number Pi.
  Like so many concepts of Netrunner, this card's design can be traced back to R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. Roleplaying Game. Interestingly, in Cyberpunk, PI in the 'Face is not a defense program for data forts, but an attack program used by Runners to fry a data fort's CPU. [...] If the program makes a successful attack, the CPU will be trapped calculating Pi.
• One source in the Planescape campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons mentions the moignos, creatures native to Mechanus (the Plane of Ultimate Law) that are obsessed with finding the finite value of Pi and spend every second of their existence trying to do so.
  • The same source says that one easy way to confuse a modron (a far more common resident of Mechanus) is to ask it to define Pi. It will eventually give up, but trying to do so should distract it long enough for you to maybe get at something it's guarding or sneak something past it. (This usually only works on the less intelligent ones.)
• In Magic: The Gathering, Quandrix students take it one step further by reciting pi backwards.^{maths note}This is impossible because pi is irrational - it keeps going forever, so there's nowhere to even begin reciting the whole thing backwards. It's unclear if this is intended them going Beyond the Impossible, or just a case of Writers Cannot Do Math. An alternative interpretation is that the students like to recite the first N digits of pi backwards, which is very much doable.

Video Games

• Moe the Clown does this in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All. It isn't to show intelligence, it's just one of his many puns.
• Minamimoto from The World Ends with You can not only recite Pi to 156 places but use it as a massive attack so strong that Crystal Dragon Jesus had to retreat to another universe. "Pi-Face" is also his nickname, and his HP from the two different times you fight are 3141 and 5926.
• In Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, Clank gets repaired by Ratchet, and nearly speaks the final digit of Pi when he wakes up.
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Sunny can be heard singing the digits of pi before a Mission Briefing.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the Boss AI contained in Peace Walker's AI Pod will attempt to recite pi as Snake removes the pod's memory boards. After a few are removed, it will incorrectly state the number as "3.2546373698888...", and when even more are removed, it will struggle to give the precise number, estimating it as "about 3."
• In Tales of the Abyss, Lorelei's fonon frequency is Pi.
• In Mountain of Faith, Marisa, getting bored of going through the stages, grumbles that she could recite pi to a thousand places by the time she got to her destination. Cirno, in "A Genius Comes When You Least Expect!", one-ups her by claiming to know pi's EXACT value (the last digit, is, of course, 9; see Richard Feynman in Real Life below).
• If you play as Ami/Sailor Mercury in the Sega Genesis Sailor Moon game, she starts off the second level beginning to recite pi before Luna interrupts her.
• In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the Stasis Stream Amplifier upgrade has the flow oscillate at pi to the fifth decimal place.
• A character begins mouthing off the Pi sequence in Persona 2 after being challenged by a Jerkass professor. Only the professor doesn't know if the student's right, as he's an English teacher.
• In Violet, Julia once promised two men that she'd sleep with whoever could recite the most digits. They took turns reciting hundreds of digits, but in the end, she went with a guy who claimed he could generate random numbers.
• Sam and Max Save the World: In episode 4, "Abe Lincoln Must Die!", Sam reads off the number for a payphone, prompting Max to start reciting the first thousand digits of pi. Sam cuts him off before he can get too far in his count:
  Sam: Max, do you have a pen?
  Max: You wanna write down the (phone) number?
  Sam: Oh, I can remember the number. I wanna write myself a reminder to smother you with a pillow in your sleep.
• Star Fox Zero: During the Area 3 mission, Fox has to leave behind his Arwing to control the Gyrowing, which is needed to control the reprogrammed Gigarilla superweapon. Rob guides the player in learning the controls, and at the end goes onto to say "It's as easy as pie", only to begin rattling off the numbers of pi. He's only heard going up to so many digits before fading away (presumably Fox cutting the transmission).

Webcomics

• Mocked in this◊ Toothpaste For Dinner cartoon, which calls you a dick if you know more than about six or seven digits of pi.
• According to this Nothing Comes Naturally strip, Cerine regularly uses pi as a password.
• Mocked in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic, which portrays a science fan who has memorized pi to 1,681 digits... and an actual scientist who has memorized one.
• Legostar Galactica: Security Chief 46 takes offense to being asked to help with a mission on a world with a math-based culture:
  46: What? Because I'm a robot I'm automatically good at math? That's just stupid!
  Bob: What's the 22nd decimal of π?
  46: 6. Damnit!
• Variation in Homestuck: the Autoresponder doesn't show off just by reciting pi to an excessive number of digits, which isn't really all that impressive for a computer program, but by claiming to have calculated the final digit of pi (four). This is obviously impossible (pi is an irrational number that has no end) and he's only saying it to screw with Dirk, as Dirk rightly points out.
• Mike: Bookseller: "Lark to cash/wrap 3.141592653589."
• Bruno recites a few digits of pi to reassure herself that she's okay.
  Bruno: I hope I don't have amnesia or something. Oh, wait... Name? Bruno. Occupation? Vagrant writer. First ten digits of pi? Three point one four one five nine two six five four. Okay, I guess I'm okay.
• Parodied by Rapunzel in Pocket Princesses. She can recite pie to 4,256 fillings.
• Mike in Cesium recited pi to the annoyance of everyone around him, until his memory was erased.
• Spiked Math:
  • Parodied in "Guide to Acting Like a Math Geek", which suggests memorizing the first three digits and making up the rest because no one will care enough to check if you are right.
  • In "Math Club Rules", a new member is forced to recite pi.

Web Original

• AsapSCIENCE: "The Pi Song", listing the first 100 digits of pi, ends with the line "Learning random digits so that you can brag to your friends". Its succeeding version with 200 digits, "The Pi Song 2.0", also includes this line after the first 100 digits.
• Gale Galleon of First Stage Production did a stream where he recited one-hundred and sixty digits of Pi for Pi Day 2024, typing in each number as he said it. With every white number he typed in, it slowly revealed a secret message written in black telling the viewers to check the bottom of the video's description for a link to the waiting room of his first unarchived karaoke later that day.
• Kureiji Ollie of hololive once held a stream that was nothing but her reciting Pi from memory. She managed to get around 2,400 digits.
• Pi has become something of a Running Gag on Homestar Runner, so much so, in fact, that it even has its own article on the site's Wiki site. In one cartoon, Strong Bad receives an email that contains a computer virus that quickly takes over and messes up the website. One character finds himself in an issue of Teen Girl Squad. What is the issue number? It is "3.14159265 and the rest"!
• LoadingReadyRun's CheckPoint has Graham start to recite all the digits of pi in honor of it being Pi Day, cuts to "Time passes", and then to him finishing, and commenting that it was shorter than he thought. The last number was a 6.
• Pi was the basis of one hideously difficult puzzle in the Alternate Reality Game Lockjaw, as chronicled in The Unholy Saga of Where.gif.
  "Day 7: ...Despite the fact that we've spent an entire friggin week on this problem, it should be simple high school mathematics from here on in. Day 8: 300 grown men and women suddenly simultaneously realize that they learned nothing in high school math.".
• During one of SmallAnt's Super Mario Odyssey streams, he mentions that he tried memorizing pi out of boredom while he was in school, and recites it to 40 decimal places to prove he still knows it. He then claims it's really not that impressive or useful to know, and jokes that the real geniuses are the people who just use the pi button on their calculator instead.

Western Animation

• The Cold Open of the Arthur episode "Buenas Noches, Vicita" shows that The Brain recites Pi to help him sleep.
• The Simpsons:
  • Some girls on a playground of a school for the gifted play hopscotch, singing, "Cross my heart and hope to die / Here's the digits that make pi / 3.1415926535897932384...".
  • Apu mentions he can recite Pi to 40,000 places as proof of his excellent memory, correctly stating that the last digit is a 1. Homer throws in an obligatory "mmmmm, pi" here.
  • Inverted in "Bye Bye Nerdie", where Professor Frink shouts out "Pi is exactly 3!" to shock an audience of rowdy scientists into silence, apologizing afterward for taking such extreme measures.
• In the Count Duckula episode "Igor's Busy Day", engaged Americans Scott and Laura stay at Castle Duckula overnight. Scott, a mathematician, reveals that he has memorised pi to 15,000 places; Duckula unwisely asks him about this and he starts demonstrating. Every time the scene cuts back to him for most of the remainder of the episode, he is still reciting. (At the end of the episode, he changes to reciting the largest known prime number, prompting Duckula to wail in despair.)
• The Batman episode "Q&A" involved the Cluemaster, a bitter ex-child genius hosting a deadly mock game show for the people he believes cheated them out of a win. Rules were simple- everyone gets one question, on any topic. They win and he lets them go free if they can ask him a question he doesn't know the answer to. One of them tries asking him the exact value of pi- he dismisses the question as being impossible to answer and recognizes it as likely being a stalling tactic, but in the name of being a fair sport, he recites the first one hundred digits just to prove he's not weaseling out of it. Batman ruins the scheme by asking him "What is the true identity of the Batman?" Ironically, he is actually not a fair sport when he fails to answer, attempting to renege on the deal.
• Reversed in a Pinky and the Brain short on Animaniacs. Brain tells Pinky to ask him any question:
  Pinky: All right, what is Pie?
  Brain: The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter having a value of eight decimal places of 3.14159265. But ask me something difficult, Pinky.
• Futurama:
  • One episode mentions the last digit of Pi as a game show question. The joke, of course, is that unless our understanding of mathematics is proven wrong within the next thousand years, there is no last digit of pi.
  • There is a Πth Avenue in New New York and ΠKEA stores.
  • In a special feature of the first Futurama movie, there is a math lecture and one of the topics is about pi. The lecturer asks the audience (that is, the Futurama staff which is chock full of math PhDs) how many digits of pi they know. Eventually, Matt Groening starts rattling off the correct digits...then some nonsense digits before ending with "333...and then just a whole bunch of 3's!"
• "Donald In Mathmagic Land" has a circular bird who recites digits of pi. And gets them wrong.
• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy stops his Nanobots' second reign of terror by tricking them into deciphering the value of Pi. After a stressful read-through of all the digits, they seize up and overload on "five". He got the idea from seeing his Bumbling Dad with a lot of pie.

Real Life

• Daniel Tammet, an Asperger's savant, holds the current European record of reciting 22,514 digits from memory. He describes the experience in his autobiography, Born on a Blue Day.
• Richard Feynman stated that he wanted to memorize the first 761 digits of pi because at that point, there is a sequence of six 9s so he could recite the numbers to there, then go "999999...and so on." "That point" was named in his honor afterwards. Douglas Hofstadter told the same anecdote. This may just be a genius thing.
• Taken to an extreme with the San Francisco Exploratorium's Pi Progression 2015. Each volunteer was given a yardstick with a digit of pi attached, then tasked with marching around the museum's pier. There was such a huge turnout that they ran out of materials, and the procession went continuously for nearly ten minutes.

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HIKE!

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