🇳🇱 Rick de Jong

The attempt

The figures are precise: 22,612 digits in 5 hours 34 minutes. That is an average of roughly 68 digits a minute, sustained without a break long enough to notice, in a discipline where a single misremembered digit ends the attempt at that point.

The record he took had stood for eleven years. Daniel Tammet had recited 22,514 digits in 2004, a feat that was widely covered because of Tammet's own public profile, and de Jong's total passed it by fewer than a hundred digits.

Who keeps the record

Pi recitation has no single governing body. The Pi World Ranking List, an independent register, maintains the standings and recognises attempts that meet its conditions; Guinness World Records maintains a separate and stricter list, and the two do not agree.

That split is the central fact about this discipline. Guinness recognises Rajveer Meena of India, who recited 70,000 digits in 9 hours 7 minutes while blindfolded on 21 March 2015, two days before de Jong's attempt. The Pi World Ranking List also recognises Suresh Kumar Sharma, who recited 70,030 digits in 17 hours 14 minutes, a mark Guinness does not carry.

The unrecognised summit

Above both of those sits a claim nobody officially counts. Akira Haraguchi of Japan says he recited 111,700 digits in 16 hours 30 minutes in 2006. The attempt has never been formally recognised by Guinness World Records, and so the world's largest reported recitation sits outside the record books entirely.

This is why a European record like de Jong's is quoted with its register attached. The number is not in dispute; which list it appears on, and under what rules, is the whole of the story.

What the discipline requires

Long pi recitations are memory feats rather than mathematical ones: the digits are arbitrary, so there is no structure to exploit and no way to derive a forgotten place from its neighbours. Practitioners typically chunk the sequence and attach the chunks to a memorised route or story.

The bottleneck is endurance as much as recall. An attempt of 22,612 digits takes most of a working day's concentration, delivered aloud under observation, with no opportunity to go back.

It is also, by design, a test of memory rather than of mathematics. No calculation any engineer performs requires tens of thousands of decimal places of pi, and the recitation lists make no claim that one does. What they measure is recall under duress, which is why they sit alongside card-memorising and binary-digit events rather than alongside arithmetic competitions.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented: the digit count, the duration, the date, the European record and the record it broke, from Mic's 2017 survey of pi record holders and from the Pi World Ranking List's own standings.

Not documented in these sources: his age or date of birth, which is why this page gives no birth year; his home city or occupation; where the attempt took place and who observed it; the method he used to memorise; and whether the European record has since changed hands. The list is a live document, and this page reflects it as reported in 2017.