Born on a Blue Day

To commemorate 20 years without seizures, Tammet decided “to do something to show that my childhood experience of epilepsy had not held me back” (173-74). He decided to help raise funds for the National Society for Epilepsy by undertaking an enormous publicity stunt: setting a new European record for reciting digits of pi. Tammet offers a little bit of the history of pi (centuries of attempts to calculate it to more and more decimal places) before discussing his experience of memorizing it to more than 22,500 digits.

As with other number sequences, pi offered a particular numerical landscape in Tammet’s mind. He says that pi became “like an entire country in my mind, composed of numbers” (178). Tammet used printouts from a supercomputer in Tokyo that contained enough digits of pi for the author to study, and he began studying in his home. The big recitation came after only three months of studying, on March 14, 2004 (“Pi Day”), in Oxford, England. In the Museum of the History of Science, in front of a crowd and cameras, Tammet successfully recited 22,514 digits of pi, breaking the standing record.