According to CNN’s Elizabeth Landau, “It’s One Pi Day”, and indeed it is as math enthusiasts all over the world celebrate March 14 (3-14) as Pi Day, to honor the number Pi. Pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle.

Landau, in her article on CNN.com, features Daniel Tammet, who is promoting France’s first Pi Day celebration at the Palace of Discovery science museum in Paris.

Pi Day brings to memory an important personal event for Tammet. It’s one that holds a special place in his heart and his relationship with the number. When he was 25 years old, he recited 22,514 digits of pi from memory in 2004, scoring the European record. He said these numbers aloud for 5 hours and 9 minutes in front of an audience at the Museum of History Science in Oxford. Some people cried – not out of boredom, but from Tammet’s passionate and emotional delivery of the numbers.

According to Tammet, “What my brain was doing was inventing a meaning, like a story,” reminiscing about the incredible day. “What I did was make a poem or a novel out of pi, and took those colors and those emotions and used them to perceive patterns, or at least to perceive patterns in my mind that were memorable that were meaningful to me.”

Numerous individuals all over the world, including Landau, have been interested in the number pi, or in memorization itself, to see how many digits one can remember from its infinite series. The challenge in memorizing the numerous succeeding digits in the number pi is due to its lack of discernible pattern. This makes memorizing it difficult, but also a somehow meaningful challenge.

Serious pi memorizers like Tammet have become a fascinating subjects of study for many scientists as well. They bring to light questions about a person’s innate ability vs. learned skills. Questions like “Are the brains of people with superior memory somehow different? Or can anyone learn thousands of random digits?” are asked when we see individuals like Tammet able to put to memory such large amount of data.

Delving further on her research on superior memorizers, Landau spoke to K. Anders Ericcson, professor of psychology at Florida State University. According to Ericcson’s research, superior memorizers have three special skills. First, they use knowledge and patterns that they already know to encode information in their long-term memory. Second, they are able to associate the information with retrieval cues, so that they can trigger the information again. And last, they also get faster at all this by becoming better at encoding and retrieval through intense practice and effort.