March 14 is Pi Day, an annual celebration of the mathematical constant of pi, representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The holiday is observed on March 14 or 3/14 because 3.14 are the first three digits of the infinite number pi — 3.14159 ... and on and on.

At an event outside Tokyo in 2006, Akira Haraguchi set an unofficial world record for reciting the most digits of pi: 100,000 over more than 16 hours. So, how’d he do it? In his mind, he linked each digit with a syllable and created a collection of epic stories from the words those syllables formed.

Pi Day itself dates to 1988, when physicist Larry Shaw began celebrations at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. The holiday didn’t really gain national recogniti