Reeves Wiedeman

The Boston Globe – 3/25/2008

By Reeves Wiedeman

At 3:14 p.m., on 3/14, Pi Day celebrations at Harvard got off to a quick start.

Josh Gottlieb, a graduate student in economics, recited 102 digits of the patternless mathematical value, while freshman Francoise Greer rattled off 228. Shawn Peasley, whose only affiliation with Harvard is as an applicant, had driven 18 hours from Kentucky for the event and set the bar at 461.

But the 75 or so people gathered in the Harvard math department lounge rather than at a Cambridge bar for happy hour were there to see someone else.

“I’m James Niles-Joyal … or J-Dog,” the event’s celebrity announces as he steps up to take his turn.

Niles-Joyal claims to have memorized 13,141 digits of pi – the number, typically shortened to 3.141, that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. This day, he is attempting to set the Harvard record by reciting a rather poetic number he has never reached without making a mistake: 3,141.

“I’m gonna take a minute to calm myself,” Niles-Joyal, a Boston College senior, says before starting. “I don’t want to misspeak, which has been a tendency of mine.” Last year his rookie bid in public pi reciting was stopped short at the 612th digit when he said 9 when he meant 6.

It was at a football game two years ago that Bob Joyal first found out his son planned to memorize pi. Having trouble sleeping the night before, Niles-Joyal had started memorizing a random number up to around 40 digits. When he woke up that morning, he remembered every one. Realizing a gift he hadn’t perceived before, Niles-Joyal decided to find an application for it. He settled on memorizing pi, a number whose seemingly random digits have long fascinated mathematicians.

To start, Niles-Joyal would pick a handful of digits at a time, eventually getting to the point where he could memorize 100 digits in 10 minutes. As time went on, he was able to memorize much larger sections.

“Most people have a digit span of around seven digits,” said Elizabeth Kensinger, a BC assistant professor in psychology who has spoken with Niles-Joyal about his memory. “What happened with James is a snowballing effect. You learn how to chunk the first 10, then 10 of those 10, then over time those sets of 100 into larger groups.”

Seeing numbers

One minute and 54 seconds into his recitation, a cellphone goes off. It is silenced immediately. Niles-Joyal has several mannerisms that get him through these distractions. Between digits 65 and 66, he sticks two fingers from his left hand (never his right) against his temple. He sips from his Dasani water bottle with regularity. His eyebrows often twitch while he recites, and his eyes alternate from being closed to staring blankly to darting around the room.

The crowd moves as little as possible. One girl knits to pass the time. Two Harvard students chatter on the side, drawing irate looks from other observers. Niles-Joyal’s parents sit separately, following their son’s progress on their own sheets with the digits listed. Bob shows little emotion as he follows along from a couch behind the semi-circle of onlookers surrounding his son, while Katherine Niles-Joyal sits nervously in the front row – she had spent 53 minutes the night before listening to Niles-Joyal recite all 3,141 digits.

When memorizing numbers, Niles-Joyal, 22, does not simply repeat the digits over and over. Instead, the Ashburnham native sees shapes, emotions, and contours in the otherwise nondescript, non-repeating set of numbers. A series of digits can evoke a “white glow” in his brain, while other sets might look wealthy, or dull, or happy.

“I don’t think what he’s doing is completely different. All of us do unconsciously use pneumonics to remember,” Kensinger said. “We know someone’s name is Steve because they remind us of another Steve.”

Niles-Joyal maintains a Word document listing the digits of pi that is a whirl of bolds and colors and underlines. Green numbers indicate an “interjection,” one of several vocabulary terms Niles-Joyal has applied to his pursuit, while reds indicate numbers that fit in a group of three, his primary memory device.

There is no one strategy for memorizing pi. Gottlieb, the first competitor at Harvard this day, was spurred to memorize the first 40 digits in middle school because “middle school is boring.” Peasley, who drove from Kentucky, learned his digits verbally, which created some awkward situations. Reciting to himself while standing in line at a Subway sandwich shop, one of the employees promised him a free sub if he could recite 100 digits (he left hungry).

Seven minutes into Niles-Joyal’s recitation, several students move to sit at a table behind the crowd where 25 pies sit for the upcoming pie-eating contest.

“I beat last year,” Niles-Joyal tells the crowd after hitting the 613th digit at 7:42, showing the first hint of a smile since he started reciting.

Less than a minute later, he hits a snag at digit 662. He pauses for 20 seconds, taking a sip from his bottle, repeats the prior four digits to get himself back in rhythm, then speeds off as if nothing happened, his voice playfully dancing through a series of six straight nines.

Counting himself out

On July 22, 2007, Niles-Joyal says he memorized 1,491 digits, his highest total in a single day. That brought him to 13,141 digits, more than enough for his planned attempt to top what was then the North American recitation record of 12,887 digits later that summer. (He didn’t compete, and that record has since been broken.) But July 22, 2007, was also the day he quit pi.

“I was done with pi,” says Niles-Joyal. “I was exhausted.”

Niles-Joyal had too much on his mind for pi. In his final year of college, he was thinking about careers, possibly law school. He finished a screenplay. His father was diagnosed with cancer again.

“That was kind of a reality check,” says Niles-Joyal. “I’d rather spend time at home with him than spend hours in my room learning digits. I’d rather talk with him, talk as a family, watch a movie, play a card game.”

It was only on March 4, just 10 days before Pi Day, that he decided to give another shot at reciting a big number.

“I wanted closure,” he said.

Seventeen minutes into the recitation, one of the three Pi Day judges following along on a sheet of digits takes a seat – only 20 or so of the original 75 onlookers remain standing. Niles-Joyal is almost a third of the way to his goal, and the wear is beginning to show. At 20:50, he strokes his chin as he contemplates the next sequence. Before digit 1,701, he takes another sip of water. A minute later he leans back, staring at the ceiling before closing his eyes tight. This pause is his longest yet. Niles-Joyal points his finger on the plastic table in front of him, as if to stab it, then clenches his left hand into a tight fist.

“Is the last thing I said `556′?” Niles-Joyal asks. His memory is correct. “OK … 556209921 …” He continues on as though nothing has happened.

The tao of pi

A music major, Niles-Joyal plans to work with Kensinger as well as a Harvard psychology graduate student working on the relationship between math and music to examine what applications his memory might have in other aspects of life. In particular, Kensinger sees potential for helping those with memory deficits (car accident victims, seniors) who might be able to take advantage of the strategies Niles-Joyal employs. “I’m fascinated by what applications of my memory there are,” he says. “I want to see if it can be applied to anything beyond this.”

It has now been over half an hour. Niles-Joyal sways in his chair, getting into a rhythm as he hits the 2,500 mark, bursting out a dozen numbers in one of his quickest sequences yet. Seconds later, he slows down, with purpose.

“3 … 1 … 4,” he announces, a dramatic pause between each digit of the first three digits that started his now 40-minute recitation.

He enjoys being a showman. When the emcee announces the start of the contest, Niles-Joyal asks if he can go last.

“We’ll give you the drama,” says Gottlieb, who’s reciting third, right before him.

Niles-Joyal hopes to compose film scores eventually, and screenplays. For now, he’s passed over the idea of law school and is looking for a finance job after graduation – something where he can turn his number memorization skills to immediate benefit.

Applied mathematics

Niles-Joyal begins to sway, wiping his hand smoothly, rhythmically across the table. Left, right, left, right.

“4 … 9 … 7 … 4 … 4 … 2 …” he says. “I think I’m done.”

Fifty minutes, 10 seconds, and 3,141 digits.

“He’s like a black belt in pi,” one student says.

Katherine flies through the crowd to hug her son. Peasley, the runner-up with 461, asks for a picture with Niles-Joyal. Bret Benesh, a math professor who served as one of the judges, presents Niles-Joyal with a $50 gift certificate for taking the top prize.

After half an hour basking in newfound glory, Niles-Joyal heads to MIT for its Pi Day, where he had been planning to make a second attempt at 3,141 digits. Having reached his goal already, however, he decides there is “nothing more pi could do for me today.” The record at MIT’s event: 150 digits.

The Boston Globe – 3/15/2008

By Reeves Wiedeman

Four months ago, Mike Hunnewell stepped off the rugby pitch for the last time. A heartbreaking loss to Army in the New England Rugby Football Union playoffs forced Hunnewell and the other seniors on the Boston College rugby team to say goodbye to the game that had taken so much of their time, sweat, and blood. After four years, their collegiate athletic careers seemed over.

Then the BC cheerleading team called.

“I thought they had to be joking at first,” Hunnewell said. “Apparently they weren’t.”

Two female cheerleaders were asking if the former rugby winger – a guy accustomed to scrums and tackles – would consider leading cheers and yelling into a cone-shaped megaphone. Now, two months later, Hunnewell and four of his former rugby teammates make up almost two-thirds of BC’s male contingent in a sport many of them associated more with a “Saturday Night Live” skit than serious athletics. The five seniors took to the court for just the sixth time last night when BC played Clemson in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.

“Our friends were like, `You guys are idiots,”‘ said Lou Somma, another rugger turned cheerer.

The rugby players’ role on the team was not an intentional one. The cheerleading squad found itself heading into the second half of the basketball season without any male members – “bases,” in the sport’s jargon. Some had left school, some were studying abroad, and some were just tired of lifting 100-pound girls over their head for an arena of 8,900 to enjoy. So out at a bar one night, seniors Kayte Giorgio and Ashley Walker, the team captains, asked Hunnewell, Somma, and three other former rugby players if they would consider joining the team.

“When the [rugby] season ended, we were all really down. We didn’t have practice, didn’t have meetings, didn’t have games to go to,” Somma said. “We laughed but decided this might be fun if we did it together.”

Stunt men

Putting their initial hesitance aside, they were the first ones to arrive at the semester’s first practice. Lauren Belden, the team’s head coach, had no expectations for her new charges. Both Mike Nash and Hunnewell, however, expected their rugby-tuned muscles could handle cheerleading with ease. They were wrong.

“You think you can just throw this 100-pound thing up in the air,” Hunnewell said. “But I don’t think I got a girl above my hips when the other guys were already putting girls above their head.”

The ruggers’ nervousness showed at the first few practices, full of more drops than successes. “They were all very intimidated at the first practice because they knew they were strong, so when they threw us they wouldn’t let us go because they were scared they would drop us,” Walker said. “They came in nervous that they weren’t gonna live up to expectations.”

Hours spent doing power cleans in the gym, a rugby staple, was as close as possible to many of the stunts, and the rugby team’s explosive workouts served them much better than the typical beach workout of bicep curls and bench presses. But the girls had to teach technique from a female perspective, and the rugby players quickly realized there was much more to cheering than pure strength.

“Stunting is a motion you don’t experience in any other sport,” said Ben Wormser, a captain and three-year member of the team. “A lot of very strong guys have had trouble ’cause it takes so much coordination.”

Then, something unexpected happened. The outsized guys more used to scrumming than stunting – cheerleading lingo for the throws and holds between a male and female cheerleader – started to get good, and get good fast.

Belden had never seen a group progress so quickly, nor had she seen guys who so badly wanted to do well. Walker was stunned when the guys got all the way to toss extensions, cheerleading’s most basic stunt, in just two practices. It had taken her previous partner – who she said has better technique than the rugby guys – six months to nail the stunt.

“With rugby it’s smash mouth,” said Somma. “With this it’s more control or you’ll send a girl tumbling.”

The competitive instinct

Ian Ward was the first of the rugby players to nail the hand extension. From there, each guy wanted to keep up with the rest, working quickly to keep pace. They began to call one another “MVP” as they learned new stunts. Belden started getting e-mails from the rugby players asking for more practices, a first for her in three years at BC, and ended up going in on several Sundays to help them move to more advanced stunts.

“The guys would call us on a Saturday morning and ask if we could practice their back flips,” Walker said. “Who practices on a Saturday morning?”

A friendly but intense competition among the players is one direct carry-over from the rugby pitch. Their seriousness is evident at practice. As Karl Danso, another former rugger, works on an assisted side flip, his female charge can only laugh as she is tossed about by his jerky technique. But Danso is not laughing. Instead, his face is determined, his lips pursed, and his eyes locked on the task at hand. Minutes later, Hunnewell barely hides his disappointment when his forearms wobble and his partner has to struggle to stay in the air. Ward’s arms buckle on a toss extension, sending a girl ungracefully to the ground.

But as practice comes to an end, the lightness the guys bring to the team returns. As Usher’s “Yeah” blares from the exercise class on the court next door, the guys pull out their best dance moves: Danso does the Shopping Cart and Hunnewell writhes on the floor in his best rendition of the Worm. When that song was released in 2004, their senior year of high school, none would have even considered cheerleading. Now they were competing to be the best male cheerleader.

“If we were gonna do this, we weren’t gonna [stink] at it,” Hunnewell said. “It’s a competition thing between us. The worst feeling is when the crowd goes `Oooh’ after you messed something up. I hate that.”

Proving themselves

Among ACC schools, BC’s cheer program is small. Three years ago, the coed team had just two male cheerleaders – and only one of them could stunt. North Carolina State has enough guys to fill two coed teams. Now, with the help of the rugby players, BC has an almost 50-50 ratio on its coed team: eight guys to nine girls.

“It’s tough to get guys, simply for the fact that most people don’t understand just how much athleticism is involved,” Belden said. “These are visibly big guys, so now you can tell it requires real athleticism.”

Cheering is not a sacrifice for the rugby players. The guys get loads of BC athletic gear, not to mention courtside seats at every BC game. And for what Belden calls these “natural showmen,” it’s clear they enjoy the limelight that has descended upon them.

As Mettalica’s “Enter Sandman” blares over the Conte Forum speakers before the BC basketball team takes on No. 2-ranked University of North Carolina, Nash and Danso look more like Randy Moss and Donte Stallworth celebrating a touchdown than cheerleaders as they leap and smack each other with a shoulder bump – their signature celebration. Later, “Shipping Up to Boston” inspires an on-court Jonathan Papelbon impersonation from Nash. During the “Burrito Toss,” they seem to be in competition to launch their foil-wrapped Qdoba T-shirts the farthest.

“The adrenaline’s going, man,” Hunnewell said at halftime of the UNC game. “Did they show us on TV?”

“We have all these fans now. Six thousand people cheering. We always wanted it but never had that kind of support with rugby,” Nash said. “In rugby you have to be focused, in the zone, all the time. When we’re cheering we get to have fun.”

In many ways, the experience has tamed the ruggers’ most violent tendencies. Their brute strength no longer serves them as well as an attention to technical detail and finesse. After one successful timeout routine, Nash carries his partner, Heather Jones, off the court in both arms as if chivalrously escorting her across a pool of water.

Belden has told the guys – only partially in jest – to make it mandatory for senior rugby players to join the cheer squad in the second semester. But she is still fighting an uphill battle. After all, can guys used to playing one of the most violent games on the planet even consider cheerleading a sport?

“Well,” said Hunnewell, sweating and breathing heavily during a break from practice. “I’m definitely giving it more consideration.”