Pi master’s storied recall

As the March 14 celebration of Pi Day approaches, toast a man who figured out how to have his pi and recite it, too — beyond 60,000 decimals. All it took was intensive practice and a knack for storytelling, a new study finds.

A Chinese man who set a world’s record in 2005 by reciting 67,890 decimals of pi learned to associate number pairs with images of people and objects, scientists report in the June Cognitive Psychology. From those images, 23-year-old Chao Lu concocted stories that corresponded to blocks of 500 to 1,000 numbers, say Yi Hu of East China Normal University in Shanghai and K.