Strategies to memorize π sometimes rely on devising a sentence with words of representative lengths. Isaac Asimov offered this one:

How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!

Count the letters in each word and you get 3.14159265358979. That’s not the best strategy, though: What shall we do about zero? And it’s hard to reel off the digits impressively for friends when you have to stop and count the letters in each word.

Arthur Benjamin, a mathematician at Harvey Mudd College, suggests using a phonetic code instead:

1 = t or th or d
2 = n
3 = m
4 = r
5 = l
6 = sh, ch, or j
7 = k or hard g
8 = f or v
9 = p or b
0 = s or z

Once we’ve memorized this list, we can turn a whole string of digits into a single word simply by inserting vowels between the consonants. So, for example, 314 could be represented by meter, motor, meteor, matter, mother, etc. The consonants h, w, and y, which don’t appear in the list, can be used like additional vowels.

Using this method, it takes only three sentences to encode the first 60 digits of π:

3. 1415 926 5 3 58 97 9 3 2 384 6264
My turtle Pancho will, my love, pick up my new mover Ginger.

3 38 327 950 2 8841 971
My movie monkey plays in a favorite bucket.

69 3 99 375 1 05820 97494
Ship my puppy Michael to Sullivan’s backrubber!

Now we just need a way to remember the sentences …

(Arthur T. Benjamin, “A Better Way to Memorize Pi: The Phonetic Code,” Math Horizons 7:3 [February 2000], 17.)

The invention of logarithms came on the world as a bolt from the blue. No previous work had led up to it, foreshadowed it, or heralded its arrival. It stands isolated, breaking in upon human thought abruptly without borrowing from the work of other intellects or following known lines of mathematical thought.

— Lord Moulton on the 300th anniversary of John Napier’s 1614 book Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms. E.W. Hobson called the invention “one of the very greatest scientific discoveries that the world has seen.”

Usain Bolt is such a great sprinter that his distinctions may extend to other worlds.

In 2013, University of Leicester physics undergraduate Hannah Lerman and her colleagues determined that the Jamaican athlete was one of the few humans who could get aloft on Saturn’s moon Titan with wings strapped to his arms.

Factoring in Titan’s gravity and atmospheric density, Lerman found that a person could take flight in a normal-sized wingsuit only if they could run at 11 meters per second.

“This speed has been reached but only by the fastest human runners, for example, Usain Bolt, who ran almost 12 m/s,” Lerman wrote. “For an average human to take off with the standard wingsuit they would require some sort of propulsion device to give them enough speed to take off.”

(H. Lerman, B. Irwin, and P. Hicks, “P5_1 You Can Fly,” Journal of Physics Special Topics, University of Leicester, Oct. 22, 2013.)

A paradox by the German mathematician Martin Löb:

Let A be any sentence. Let B be the sentence: ‘If this sentence is true, then A.’ Then a contradiction arises.

Here’s the contradiction. B makes the assertion “If B is true, then A.” Now consider this argument. Assume B is true. Then, by B, since B is true, A is true. This argument shows that, if B is true, then A. But that’s exactly what B had asserted! So B is true. And therefore, by B, since B is true, A is true. And thus every sentence is true, which is impossible.

(Lan Wen, “Semantic Paradoxes as Equations,” Mathematical Intelligencer 23:1 [December 2001], 43-48.)