Harvard’s Famous Pi Memorization Contest
The lawn in front of Annenberg Hall was packed with freshmen.
At 8 p.m., Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blasted from the speakers on the makeshift stage, while blankets and pizza boxes lay scattered all over the grass in cheerful disarray.
Everyone held a red plastic cup.
Whether the liquid inside contained alcohol was an open secret.
On one side, people were screaming as they hurled a Frisbee back and forth; on the other, an upperclassman was running a bingo game while asking freshmen for their names and majors.
“If I drink this, won’t I get caught?”
“I heard the proctor’s covering for us. Who cares?”
“You’re crawling home on all fours tonight!”
That was Harvard in 1991.
Just then, floor proctor Jack climbed onto a wooden crate and threw both hands into the air.
“Hey, freshmen! Welcome to Harvard! Now let’s kick off something really fun!”
Grumbling broke out all around him.
“Not this again?”
“Didn’t they do this last year? Don’t they ever get tired of it?”
“It’s just hazing, basically. Making fools of freshmen in front of everyone. Harvard-style initiation.”
Jack grinned.
“That’s right. The annual thing. The Freshman Pi Recitation Challenge! If you’re at Harvard, you’d better know how to love numbers, right?”
He held up a large brown envelope and a thick binder.
“The prize is this! A $100 Harvard Coop bookstore gift card, plus a binder full of economics final exam past papers and summary notes that your upperclassmen spent years sweating over!”
A gasp rippled through the freshmen.
“Whoa, that’s actually real?”
“If you have that, half your midterms are basically done for you.”
“I’m confident in memorization.”
Jack said, “The rules are simple. You get three minutes to memorize pi. Let’s see how far you can go. Miss even one digit, and you’re out. Whoever goes the farthest is today’s Pi Master. Starting now—you’ve got three minutes!”
At once, Victor sprang to his feet.
“Looks like this show needs a winner, and it might as well be me. Watch closely, roommate.”
For three minutes, Victor stared hard at the pi chart tacked up at the front.
Then he stepped onto the stage and took the microphone.
“3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510······”
By the time he passed fifty digits, beads of sweat had gathered on his forehead.
He hesitated for a moment around sixty digits, then lowered the mic with a laugh.
“That’s far enough.”
“Sixty-two digits! Not bad for the first person up!”
The crowd cheered and clapped.
Next came a Texas boy in a plaid shirt.
“Everything’s bigger in Texas.”
He broke past eighty digits before setting the mic down.
Then a girl from Chicago stepped onto the stage and carried it on to around ninety digits.
Last came a young man in a loose hoodie, who recited 114 digits without a single mistake before stepping down.
“114 digits! Still in first place!”
A few more challengers tried, but the wall at a hundred digits loomed high.
“Damn. In high school I was practically called a genius. So Harvard really is full of monsters, huh?”
Victor, who had only made it to sixty digits, looked thoroughly discouraged.
Then a girl in the front row quietly raised her hand.
Blond waves cut neatly across her shoulders, and her features were so beautiful she might have walked out of a movie.
She was Grace, the top freshman this year.
Whispers spread through the crowd.
“Isn’t she the one who asked all those insane questions at orientation?”
“I heard she’s a math major. So the real deal has shown up.”
“Did you hear? Her dad’s the CEO of GreenHell.”
Grace took the microphone.
Without a trace of nerves, she began reciting the numbers.
“3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119······”
Her voice was clear, keeping a steady rhythm that gradually quieted the noisy lawn.
She passed a hundred digits with ease.
When she sailed past 150 and 200 digits without a single slip, the murmuring died down.
An upperclassman in the front row tried to keep up by jotting the numbers down in a notebook, but gave up somewhere near 250 digits.
As the timer approached the end, Jack counted down on his fingers.
Grace stopped of her own accord after well past 300 digits.
“That’s enough for me.”
Jack turned to another upperclassman helping to verify the count.
“How many digits?”
“321 exactly. Not a single mistake.”
“Wow! That’s a new record for a freshman!”
Applause and whistles burst out.
Jack came forward with the prize envelope and the binder of old exam papers.
“Tonight’s Pi Queen is······!”
Before he could finish, a quiet voice came from behind.
“Wait. I’d like to try too.”
A small Asian kid from the lower end of the admissions rankings.
Lee Sanha. That was me.
* * *
I stepped forward.
All eyes turned to me at once.
And then a memory from my past life surfaced.
The Harvard Economics freshman welcome party.
There had been a pi recitation game there too.
I’d tripped over my pronunciation and messed up at only 36 digits.
I remembered the way my classmates and upperclassmen had laughed at me.
“Not as impressive as I thought. Don’t they say Asians are good at math?”
“How did a guy with that brain get into Harvard?”
“Leave him alone. He’ll weed himself out soon enough.”
It had become a trauma, a kind of PTSD.
After that day, I started memorizing pi as a hobby.
I’d add one digit at a time on the bus to campus, while waiting in line for coffee, whenever my hands had nothing else to do.
When I worked on Wall Street, if stress got too intense, I’d shut off my monitor and mentally trace the digits of pi instead.
Instead of price curves, I’d picture an endless string of numbers and check how far I’d climbed, like a private ritual to calm myself down.
Eventually I met people online who were just as insane as I was—maybe even worse.
Their usernames alone were plastered with mathematical constants and prime numbers.
I learned that every weekend they gathered in the corner of a shabby Manhattan café to verify one another’s records.
One person would hold a thick printout and read from it, another would recite the digits with their eyes closed.
The rest would sit nearby with pens, circling mistakes in red as they found them.
A wiry middle-aged programmer, a math professor who dreamed of winning a pi memorization contest, a trader who did mental arithmetic for fun—among those oddballs of every age and profession, I was one of the participants too.
In that group, I had my 10,000 digits verified.
I still remembered the air in that moment when someone stopped the stopwatch and said, “That’s enough,” and the faint whistle that slipped from the person beside me.
At last, Jack asked, “Ready?”
“Yes.”
Victor leaned over and whispered, “Hey, you saw that girl’s record, right? She was in the 300s. You can back out now. No shame in that.”
“It’s fine. I came all this way, so I might as well try. If I do win, I’ll share the prize.”
I gave him a faint smile.
I took one deep breath and gripped the microphone tightly with my right hand.
The stage lights were a little blinding, but the sequence of numbers in my head was crystal clear.
Bringing the microphone close to my lips, I ran through the first section one more time in my mind.
“3.1415926535······”
I deliberately spoke the first fifty digits in a clear, ordinary pace.
It was the warm-up, the part where I let my tongue and mouth adjust to the flow of the numbers.
Once I crossed the hundred-digit mark, I paused briefly to catch my breath and adjusted the rhythm.
From the audience came murmurs along the lines of, “Ohhh, not bad—look at him go. Asian, of course.”
As I passed 150 and 200 digits, I began to quicken slightly.
The numbers were still crisp, but the gaps between syllables narrowed, and the whole thing started to take on the rhythm of rap.
“Wait, how many digits is he at now?”
Someone whispered, and the math major in the front row pulled out his notebook again and started writing the numbers down.
Near 300 digits, he lowered the notebook and just stared at me, mouth hanging open.
Intentionally, I kept going even after passing the 312th digit.
I walked right past the point where Grace had stopped.
The timer Jack was holding flashed red: 1:00.
Taking the remaining time into account, I pushed the pace up another notch.
By the time I passed 800 digits, the entire lawn had gone silent.
Only my voice and the distant sound of traffic remained.
950, 960······
I was headed for the stopping point I had set for myself at 1,000 digits.
Then the timer spit out its end-of-time alert.
Beep—beep—beep—
Total silence.
Jack grabbed the microphone.
“Um······ did anyone, did anyone keep count?”
The bespectacled student in the front row shot his hand into the air.
“1,000 digits! Exactly one thousand!”
His voice sliced through the stillness.
“Precisely 1,000 digits after the decimal point, with no mistakes.”
In that instant, the silence broke apart.
“Wooooah!”
“That’s impossible! He memorized that in three minutes? He must’ve come in already knowing it!”
“What kind of insane person exists in the world? Even if he did, a thousand digits is still incredible!”
Amid the cheers and whistles, Jack stepped forward and handed me the prize envelope and the binder of old papers.
“Congratulations, Lee Sanha. Today’s Pi Master is you.”
The freshmen around me closed in in a ring.
“Are you a savant?”
“How far can you actually go?”
“So Asians really are good with numbers after all.”
With a friendly smile, I explained a little more.
“It’s simple. You turn numbers into stories. You think of a sentence like ‘How I wish I could calculate pi easily,’ then count the letters in each word, and it goes 3-1-4-1-5-9······ that kind of thing. You build hundreds of sentences like that. And it doesn’t stop there—you can also group the digits into fours and fives and turn them into images, like phone numbers or dates. Think of it as making a strange cartoon in your head. That’s what we call a mnemonic memory method. Of course, making hundreds of sentences and connecting them all together is a pretty tedious job.”
The faces around me went blank.
That blank look people wore when they were confronted with real madness.
Victor jabbed my side with his elbow.
“You crazy bastard, you’re actually a math major, aren’t you? Tutor me before midterms, no matter what. I’m your first student. Got it?”
At Victor’s joke, Jack and a few others laughed along.
Honestly, I could have gone as far as 10,000 digits, but I didn’t bother saying so.
If I said that, I’d really sound like a lunatic, wouldn’t I?
* * *
“······.”
While everyone else cheered, the beauty with blond hair and blue eyes said nothing.
Grace looked down at her empty hands.
No prize envelope. No binder of old exams.
She had never once come in second in her life.
Even just before, she had assumed tonight would be no different.
When she passed 300 digits, she had felt something familiar in the way everyone was looking at her.
The inevitable first place.
But then—
...A thousand digits after the decimal point? And he memorized all of that in three minutes?
Grace’s gaze fixed on the Asian student her own age, the one surrounded by people.
Small build, black hair, quiet demeanor.
A moment ago he had been just another face in the crowd, but now he looked slightly different—more interesting, somehow.
When he explained his method, most of the freshmen took it as some kind of neat trick, but Grace noticed something else.
There was long, accumulated training in it, and a stubbornness sharpened over many years.
She felt intrigued.
It was the feeling you got when you met someone who seemed to know a little more about a world you still didn’t understand.
Lee Sanha.
Grace slowly repeated his name once in her mind.
Good. Harvard’s going to be more interesting than I thought.