Mathwizurd.com is created by David Witten, a mathematics and computer science student at Stanford University. For more information, see the "About" page.

Day One

My memory is bad. I always forget what I forget, and I rarely rely on myself to remember things. After reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, I was inspired by memory training and I knew I wanted to get good at it. So, I decided to train for the 2016 USA Memory Championship. This blog will chronicle my training and progression into hopefully becoming the next USA Memory Champion. Well, more realistically, top 50% of the USA Memory Championship competitors. 

From what I've read, there are four qualifying events at the championship:

  1. Names and Faces
    I tried out a names and faces memory game online, and I didn't do that well, it seems pretty hard.
  2. Speed Numbers
    Memorizing numbers doesn't seem TOO bad, I've memorized a good amount of digits of pi. However, looking at the event, it's pretty harsh- even one mistake on a line gives you no credit for the line.
  3. Speed Cards
    I'm pretty sure it won't be too hard, or not much harder than the numbers.
  4. Poetry
    This seems absurd. I don't know how I'd remember an entire poem with correct punctuation and capitalization everywhere.

Well, I guess I'll start by reading into strategies, and getting a book and/or finding a memory coach; I'll keep you updated.