Young man who won Guinness for memorization used technique to study mathematics

Belo Horizonte student Maike Anthony dos Santos Silva, 17, told CNN this Sunday (21) his technique to win the Guinness World Records of memorization. He was able to remember the most decimal places, with 10,122 digits.

Maike explains whose goal was to win the gold medal at the Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad (OBMEP). Studying for the subject, she began reading books on mental calculus, where she discovered memorization techniques and became interested.

To train, he started to memorize various things, such as the 3,141 digits of pi, all the countries in the world and their capitals and the entire periodic table, which ended up being published on his YouTube channel.

“What inspired me to try and break a Guinness World Records record was the number of decimal places. In addition to memorizing numbers being a great way to train memory, breaking this record would require a lot of my skills and therefore would be a great challenge”, he explains.

Preparation began on February 27 of last year. First, Maike memorized 1,008 digits for nine days and then. 1,050.

“After memorization, I divided my days between studying and reciting the digits. I used to record my voice saying all the figures and listen to the audio later to correct them,” he continues.

The solidification stage continued until the day of the attempt, February 6, which lasted two hours and twenty minutes. “On the day of the attempt, I was very anxious, even after having trained a lot, but luckily everything went as expected.”

He was in a room, where he was being recorded, speaking the numbers, without being able to have any kind of interruption. All digits need to be corrected by two witnesses and timed by a timekeeper.

There cannot be a pause longer than 15 seconds between one digit and another. If there is an error, the record holder must correct it before saying the next number.

“But that wasn’t accurate in my case, as I recited all the digits correctly the first time,” he says.

His dream is to study mathematics at a university in the United States.