http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MouthfulOfPi

"The world's made up of numbers!" note Pictured: 96 digits recited. Tapping the screen at this point produces another speech bubble containing 60 more for a total of 156 digits.

Fred, Angel "I could go to Vegas. Learn to play Black Jack. Memorize four hundred fifty two consecutive digits of pi, a few hundred measly cards are easy."

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A quick way to show that a character is a genius is to have him recite pi to an absurd number of places. With its endless parade of decimal digits, π has both mystique and geek cred  it has its own holiday , it's splashed across mugs and T-shirts, calculating 1–10 millions of digits of π is a very common way of testing your CPU's power, and it's honored by movies and songs . Most of us never memorize it past a few places, so anyone who can fire off a hundred surely must be a genius, right?

For the record, odds are that your computer "knows" pi to the nearest multiple of 2-52, about 2.168×10-15, so about fifteen reliable digits. Ditto for e. You can compute it much more precisely, but you'll need to make your own storage.

The truth is, only a handful of digits are needed for most applications  only 11 decimal places are needed to calculate the circumference of the Earth to a millimeternote And due to the effects of General Relativity, you would get the wrong answer anyway, while only 42 are needed to find the circumference of a circle the size of the entire universe to within less than the diameter of a single proton. There's not much point in memorizing a hundred places other than to show off. (And indeed, after that many digits you can use whatever wrong digits you want because the math will still be pretty darn close  though you'll have a lot of mathematicians gritting their teeth ) For obvious reasons, this is a go-to Overly Long Gag. For reference, here's a handy guide ◊ , and another .

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On the other hand, some people really do just enjoy the challenge of memorization, the same way a theater geek might memorize scenes from Shakespeare or a Trekker entire scenes from their favorite episode, and they do it for personal satisfaction rather than any desire to show up anyone else; any feelings of inadequacy are the responsibility of those who feel them, not the math geek's.

Perhaps the reason Reed Richards Is Useless is because he spends his time memorizing numbers he'll never use. It's also a common attribute of the Absent-Minded Professor and the TV Genius, as the contrast is a wonderful thing to show or rant about.

Inversely, a quick way to show that a character is stupid is have him not know what pi is at all: "Apple or cherry?"

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Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Comic Books

Discussed Trope in a The Cartoon History of the Universe footnote  the author believes that the accuracy of Pi is a pretty good indicator of a civilization's general mathematical/scientific ability. He then goes on to point out that The Bible specifies that the dimensions of the bronze basin for the Temple should be 10 cubits across, and 30 cubits around, putting the value of Pi at exactly three. Solomon: And now you know why I hired outside contractors as the architects!

Comic Strips

Foxtrot: One strip had Jason Fox reciting enough digits of pi to fill several panels after Paige asks him what it is. In the last panel, implied to take place hours later with Jason still reciting, she exclaims, "Mother, how is this MY fault?" Another strip had a scene at a nerd camp that Jason and Marcus were attending. When a kid is late for Roll Call, the counselor tells him to do a pushup and recite pi to thirty places. Another strip involved hiking the football on the count of pi. Naturally, they never got around to actually hiking the ball.

In Monty, when Robotman disappears, he is replaced by an alien human hybrid whose full name is 3.1415..., but his friends call him Mr Pi. Because the name was given to him as an insult he later changes it to Dave.

A mostly forgotten character in Peanuts was 5, a kid whose family had numbers instead of names. In one strip where he appeared, Linus asked Charlie Brown what sort of name he'd like if that were the case with everyone: Charlie Brown: How about 3.14159? Linus: I don't know, Charlie Brown... I have a feeling that every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be called 3.14159!

In Pearls Before Swine, Goat tries to recite pi as a pickup line. It doesn't work.

Fan Works

Mentioned as a subversion in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter nine, to lampshade Harry's broader intellect as compared to Hermione's Book Smarts. Harry knows pi down to six decimals because that's accurate enough for most practical purposes. Hermione knows a hundred decimals because that was what was printed in her math textbook.

Films  Live-Action

This is the motif of Darren Aronofsky's film π. The protagonist is a Mad Mathematician who seems to discover a 216-digit number that holds the Meaning of Life. In the climax of the film, he recites the numbers while having a breakdown. Ironically, the actual number pi appears nowhere in the movie except the opening credits. (The credits show pi to many decimal places, but only the first 8 digits after the decimal point are correct.)

In Never Been Kissed, the Denominators put on a bake sale with a banner reading: "Pie = $1.00. Pi = 3.1457869986". Only the first two digits after that decimal point are correct, the rest is gibberish.

In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian the protagonist and his "girlfriend" have to solve a riddle to which the answer is Pi (something about the heart of the tomb of the pharaoh). They were helped by Bobblehead Einsteins, who proceed to tell them the (supposedly) correct combination. The protagonist constantly mixes them up, but the girlfriend remembers the numbers correctly. Apparently pi is less than ten digits long.

In The Film of the Book Life of Pi, the title character writes it to a ludicrous length while introducing himself in elementary school. He does this to hopefully impress the kids enough so they would stop intentionally mispronouncing his actual name, Piscine, as "pissing". It works. From that day on, he's just "Pi".

Thai exam cheating heist movie Bad Genius has one of the characters rattling off digits of Pi as establishing moment of his intelligence and rivalry with main character Lynn, another straight-A student.

Subverted in Spanish comedy film Toc Toc. One of the characters has a very bad case of arithmomania but when asked about Pi he just says "3.1416" (altough he lampshades that he is refraining himself)

Literature

Live-Action TV

Magazines

In MAD's "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", halavah (used to define the unit of mass) is described as a form of pie whose specific gravity is 3.1416 and specific heat is .31416.

Music

Tabletop Games

In the Netrunner collectible card game there exists a card "PI in the 'Face "; its cover art includes a decimal expansion of the number Pi. Like so many concepts of Netrunner, this card's design can be traced back to R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. Roleplaying Game. Interestingly, in Cyberpunk, PI in the 'Face is not a defense program for data forts, but an attack program used by Runners to fry a data fort's CPU. [...] If the program makes a successful attack, the CPU will be trapped calculating Pi.

"; its cover art includes a decimal expansion of the number Pi. One source in the Planescape campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons mentions the moignos, creatures native to Mechanus (the Plane of Ultimate Law) that are obsessed with finding the finite value of Pi and spend every second of their existence trying to do so. The same source says that one easy way to confuse a modron (a far more common resident of Mechanus) is to ask it to define Pi. It will eventually give up, but trying to do so should distract it long enough for you to maybe get at something it's guarding or sneak something past it. (This usually only works on the less-intelligent ones.)



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