Piphilology

Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember many digits of the mathematical constant π. The word is a play on the word "pi" itself and of the linguistic field of philology.

There are many ways to memorize π, including the use of piems (a portmanteau, formed by combining pi and poem), which are poems that represent π in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit.^[1] Here is an example of a piem: "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." Notice how the first word has three letters, the second word has one, the third has four, the fourth has one, the fifth has five, and so on. In longer examples, 10-letter words are used to represent the digit zero, and this rule is extended to handle repeated digits in so-called Pilish writing. The short story "Cadaeic Cadenza" records the first 3,834 digits of π in this manner, and a 10,000-word novel, Not A Wake, has been written accordingly.^[2]

However, poems prove to be inefficient for large memorizations of π. Other methods include remembering patterns in the numbers (for instance, the year 1971 appears in the first fifty digits of π) and the method of loci (which has been used to memorize π to 67,890 digits).^[3]