Beijing: A Chinese college student has set a new Guinness world record by reciting almost 68,000 digits of pi or the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle in just over one day.
Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student in Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Shaanxi Province, took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite to the 67,890th decimal place of pi without an error.
He achieved his feat on November 19th last year but was only recently confirmed to be the new record holder by the Guinness headquarters in Britain.
The previous Guinness world record was set by a Japanese, who recited pi to the 42,195th decimal place in 1995.
"It was Zu Chongzhi, the ancient Chinese mathematician, who discovered the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, and Chinese should win the pi recitation contest," Lu was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
Lu started learning to recite pi in 2004 and spent more than 10 hours memorising and practicing everyday during his summer college vacation last year.
Officials with Lu's university said he had a very good memory and needed only 10 minutes to memorise a 100-digit number.
Lu said he was writing a book to share his experience on improving memory. He has also started a memory training centre with classmates.
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