For most people in the world, March 14 is just another day, but for math enthusiast, it means something else entirely--it is Pi Day.
The number itself, might not be much, but when combining it with the third month of the year, it forms 3-14, which is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle.
For one such math-nut, Daniel Tammet, who is promoting France's first Pi Day celebration at the Palace of Discovery science museum in Paris. His relationship to this number is special.
As CNN reports, "At age 25, he recited 22,514 digits of pi from memory in 2004, scoring the European record. For an audience at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, he said these numbers aloud for 5 hours and 9 minutes. Some people cried -- not out of boredom, but from sheer emotion from his passionate delivery."
"What my brain was doing was inventing a meaning, like a story," Tammet said. "What I did was make a poem or a novel out of pi, and took those colors and those emotions and used them to perceive patterns, or at least to perceive patterns in my mind that were memorable, that were meaningful to me," he told CNN.
It wasn't just an amazing feat for Tammet, scientists around the world have been memorizers by people like him for years because he, and people like him, bring up " fundamental questions about innate ability vs. learned skills. Are the brains of people with superior memory somehow different? Or can anyone learn thousands of random digits?"
Dubbed as being "superior memorizers," research by K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University have found that these people have three special skills.
"They use knowledge and patterns that they already know to encode information in their long-term memory. They associate that information with retrieval cues, so that they can trigger the information again. They also get faster at all this by becoming better at encoding and retrieval through intense practice and effort," according to CNN's interview.
His theory could explain Chao Lu, who, in 2005, at the age 23, set the current world record for pi recitation at 67,890 digits, but not many tend to agree with such a direct answer.
"There's no straightforward control over what we remember and what we forget; we all wish we could remember some things and forget others. But it is possible to train as a mental athlete, and there are entire competitions around that," said Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking With Einstein" and memory championship winner, according to CNN.
Foer added, "why do people memorize pi? Why do people climb Mount Everest? You don't need to do it...but, there's something about wanting to see how far you can go and how much you can push yourself," reported CNN.
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