A 59 year old Japanese mental health counsellor, Akira Haraguchi, managed to recite pi to the number's first 83,431 decimal places from his memory, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and is a non-repeating number. Pi is known for turning up in all sorts of scientific equations, including those describing the DNA double helix, a rainbow, ripples spreading from where a raindrop fell into water, waves, navigation and more.

This feat seems to me beyond the limits of human capacity yet it was obviously done. I would sure love to know the trick.

BBC News July 2, 2005