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If Only the Party Could Go On Forever: On 3/14, Students Revel in the Wonders of Pi
And what is that something?
"We're not sure," they chimed.
  Excitement builds for students at Keene Mill Elementary School as the clock counts up to 1:59:26, which contains the fourth through eighth numbers of pi. (Photos By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post) |
As the fifth-graders played games and ate apple, pumpkin and cherry pie -- as well as cookies and round brownies and a Pi Day cake -- they kept an eye on a digital clock on a big screen. At 1:59:26, shouts of "Happy Pi Day!" filled the cafeteria. The kids cheered and jumped.
After things quieted down, Jama Ayalew, 10, stood at the microphone and recited his poem:
I like pi. Pi is cool.
People who like to say it look like a fool.
I go out to find it every day.
But in the end, I just play.
Jama might think it's a little strange to memorize pi, but plenty do it. Yesterday's champion at Keene Mill knew 123 digits. Serena Rezny, 21, an applied math major at Harvard, recited 866 digits at the university's 2006 Pi Day contest and planned to participate this year. She said she started when she was about the age of the Keene Mill students, stopped for a few years and then picked it up again.
Chao Lu of China became the world record holder when he recited pi from memory to 67,890 places in November 2005, according to Guinness World Records.
Tania can't imagine how he did it. Seventy-two digits seemed an awful lot.
"I tried to read the number over and over until it got stuck in my brain," she said. "It's really, really long."
Sara Felsen, 10, wasn't interested in memorizing a number she finds "brain-rackingly long." To her, that was really irrational. Instead, she wrote a "pi-ku":
Archimedes wrote
a never-ending number
3.141 . . . .
