The Multimedia Guru, Michael Niedermayer, is widely known to possess an encyclopedic — and sometimes downright frightening — knowledge of multimedia technology, theory, and related mathematics. Check out this old mailing list thread, wherein we were trying to sort of the finer details of a reverse engineered, game-related video codec (Electronic Arts TQI, if you must know). Allow me to summarize:

• Reverse engineer: These floats show up in the original binary decoder and it’s anyone’s guess as to what they really mean: 1.306563, 0.541196, 0.382439.
• Michael Niedermayer: 1.3065630 = cos(pi*2/16)sqrt(2), 0.5411961 = cos(pi*6/16)sqrt(2), and “0.3824393, ROTFL, this is wrong, its certainly supposed to be: 0.3826834 (0x3EC3EF15) = cos(pi*6/16); compare: 0x3ec3cf15” (and he was right)
• Everyone else, in unison: WTF?! You knew those numbers off the top of your head?

So that pretty much left us in slack-jawed amazement. At least, until Michael revealed his secret: ‘grep -r 5411961 MPlayer’.