Mnemonics for numbers

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William
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Mnemonics for numbers

Post by William »

I first became aware of the use of a mnemonic for remembering a number when I read in a book a rhyme for remembering the value of pi to a number of decimal places.

The number of letters in each word of the sequence of words corresponding to the digit which it is desired to remember.

The rhyme for pi began as follows.

Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force and magic spelling

Thus the value 3.14159265358 can be remembered.

I remembered this technique when I was keying a ligature glyph using WordPad. It was an st ligature. What was the Alt code? Even remembering that the seven regular Unicode glyphs are in the order ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, long s t and st and that they start at U+FB00 (where FB00 is a hexadecimal value), though useful, did not solve the problem directly.

So I needed to start Microsoft Calculator in View Scientific mode and convert FB00 hexadecimal to decimal. The answer is 64256.

I thought of the following mnemonic for that value.

Ligate some of those glyphs

Hopefully that phrase will be of use to some readers when using Alt in WordPad. The 64256 value gives the Alt code for the ff ligature. The others have higher values.

Readers wishing to try using that mnemonic may like to know that the following font has those seven ligatures.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CHRONTXT.TTF

While preparing this post I searched for the rhyme for pi on the web and found the following page.

http://fun-with-words.com/mnem_numbers.html

William Overington

27 November 2008
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