Pi Mnemonics and the Art of Constrained Writing

Abstract

Following the success of “Circle Digits”, my prose mnemonic for the first 402 digits of π that was published in The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1986, I began work on several even more ambitions mnemonics. I realized that, in esssence, the construction of a literary ππ mnemonic is a (rather difficult) form of constrained writing. Constrained writing is the art of constructing a work of prose or poetry that obeys some artificially-imposed constraint. (For example, the French novel La Disparition by George Perec does not contain the letter e.)