by Jason Marshall

The wind is howling, the rain is pouring down, and—all things considered this is a lot more important than the weather—the fate of humanity is resting entirely in your hands. Because if you can defuse the insanely huge bomb you’ve been called in to deal with, the world will be safe. If not…well, that’d be bad. Are you worried? Not in the least. After all, now that we’ve learned the basics of memorizing numbers, you—and by that I mean the “Secret Agent Math” you—are ready to learn the last few details of this memory trick and finally deal with that bomb once and for all. Which is exactly what we’re doing today.

Review: How to Use the “Major System”

As we learned in the first part of this series, the first step in using what’s called the “Major System” for memorizing numbers is to turn each of the digits in your number into a consonant. For example, the numeral 0 becomes a “z” or an “s” and the numeral 1 becomes a “d” or a “t”. As we learned in the second part of this series, once you’ve turned your number into a list of consonants, you next need to mix vowels and the letters “w,” “h,” and “y” in with your consonants to create one or more words.

When you’ve done that, you’re basically finished…so long as you’re sure that those words you’ve turned your number into are memorable. After all, if you can’t remember the words, you’re no better off than you were when you couldn’t remember the number! So how do you make sure those words are memorable? Well, as luck would have it, I’ve got a few quick and dirty tips to make that easier.

How to Remember Phrases

Up first, let’s assume you’ve turned your number into a phrase that you’re happy with. As an example, let’s imagine you need to memorize the admittedly not-so-hard-to-remember number 54,321. Using the Major System, you’ve converted these digits into the series of consonants “l-r-m-n-d”. Then, because you’re clever, you add in vowels and one “h” to turn this into the fairly memorable phrase “alarm hand.”

Although this is reasonably memorable, it’s still not good enough—we need something that you’ll truly never forget. The trick to doing this is to not actually try to remember the semi-memorable phrases you come up with, but instead to turn those phrases into impossible-to-forget mental pictures. In this case, you might picture yourself waking up in bed to the sound of your alarm. Only instead of seeing the ceiling when you open your eyes, you see a giant “alarm hand” looming over you! While that might be a creepier image than you want to carry around in your head, it really does work. And the end result is that you’ll have turned your number into an out-of-the-ordinary mental picture that you truly can’t forget.

An Easier Way to Use the Major System

But what if you’re having trouble turning the consonants that correspond to the digits in your number into a good phrase in the first place? In that case, your problem isn’t that you can’t make unforgettable mental pictures, it’s that you can’t figure out what even needs to go in those mental pictures! In truth, this is the most difficult part of using the Major System. But I’ve got really good news for you: there are web sites and smartphone apps that will do most of the heavy lifting for you!

You can find a list of these at the bottom of the Wikipedia page about the Major System. My personal favorite at the moment is a site called http://pinfruit.com. Just go to that site and enter the number you’re trying to memorize into the text box. The Major System rules we’ve learned about are then used to automatically do the numeral-to-consonant conversions and to figure out all of the words you could make from them. Once you select the first word in your soon-to-be memorable phrase, you’ll be given another list of words that will encode the next group of digits in your number. When you’re all finished, the end result should be a fantastic and highly memorable phrase. It’s actually surprisingly fun to play around with and it’s astonishing how many words you can make from pretty much any number, so I really do encourage you to check out http://pinfruit.com.

Can Secret Agent Math Save the World…Again?

There’s one last loose end that we haven’t quite tied up yet: Does Secret Agent Math successfully defuse the bomb and save the world? Well, as I’m sure you know by now, with the Major System for memorizing numbers in your bag of tricks, the task of remembering that 10-digit number to punch into the keypad and deactivate the bomb is a cinch. All Secret Agent Math did was create an unforgettable mental picture from the phrase “muddy road leaping jewelry” (I’m thinking of a bunch of wild necklaces and rings doing the broad-jump over a sopping-wet country lane), and the first 10-digits of the famous irrational number π = 3.141592654 came immediately to mind, defused the bomb, and saved the world from destruction. And the moral is: with math on your side, every story will have a happy ending.

Practice Problems

Okay, that’s all the math we have time for today. But before we finish, here are a few practice problems for you to work on. Can you turn these numbers into unforgettable mental pictures?

1. Your pet’s date of birth in the format MM/DD/YY

2. Your phone number

3. The first 7 digits of your favorite irrational number

You can find the answers I come up with in my post this week on The Quick and Dirty blog.

Wrap Up

Remember to become a fan of the Math Dude on Facebook where you’ll find a new featured number or math puzzle posted every weekday. And if you’re on Twitter, please follow me there too. Finally, if you have math questions, feel free to send them my way via Facebook, Twitter, or by email at mathdude@quickanddirtytips.com.

Until next time, this is Jason Marshall with The Math Dude’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Make Math Easier. Thanks for reading, math fans!