'Britney in Bath With Einstein'

March 15, 2007 — -- Britney in a bathtub with Einstein?!

That's how English brain researcher Ed Cooke remembers the number pi up to 100 places… but we'll come back to him in a moment.

This is a story about pi. You remember -- from grade school -- pi is that endless number: 3.141592....

Briefly to review, (pay close attention, there may be a pop quiz on Friday) pi is the number with which you multiply the length of the diameter of a circle to get the length of the perimeter of that circle.

It works for little circles, big circles -- any circle.

Known to the ancient Egyptians, it's just a little bigger than three but with an infinite number of digits behind the decimal point.

That is, pi is equal to 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510…

Mind-numbing, right? But believe me, that relatively short figure is amateur night. This reporter happens to know pi to just 50 places -- I've always found it kind of catchy, like a nonsense rhyme.

But beyond 50 places… that's where terminal -- or rather nonterminal -- geekiness begins.

You can check it out on YouTube. There, you'll find there's a whole subset of humans (so to speak) planetwide who revel in reciting pi to thousands -- and tens of thousands -- of places.

The world recently saw Daniel Tammet of England reciting pi to 22,514 places -- it took him 5 hours and 9 minutes -- in front of news cameras and a closely checking panel of pi-checkers.

But even that is bush league, sort of.

The official world record is held by a one Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who did pi to 67,890 digits.

It took him more than 24 hours.

He sent 26 video cassettes of his performance to the Guinness World Records as proof.

But he's apparently been beaten -- unofficially, at least -- by a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan named Akira Haraguchi.

He is reported recently to have done pi to 100,000 places -- in a galloping 16 hours.