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Students Get Taste Of Pi

JASMINA MEYER/Highlands Today

Pi challenge contestant and South Florida Community College student Alex Wheaton intensely concentrates as he recites 86 digits of Pi on Thursday in Avon Park.

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By MARC VALERO

Highlands Today

Published: March 13, 2009

AVON PARK - Celebrating an irrational number can be construed as being a bit irrational, but holding a pi day event seems to be a logical way to have fun.

With pizza pies, essays, a poem and a reciting pi challenge, South Florida Community College gave pi its 30 minutes in the spotlight Thursday.

The Greek letter is used to represent the mathematical relationship between a circle's diameter (its width) and its circumference (the distance around the circle).

Actually, by rounding pi to two decimal places (3.14) the official pi day is March 14.

Last year's winner of the recitation challenge, Jessica Baker, said before the competition that her goal was 56 or 60 digits.

The elementary education major from Zolfo Springs said she had plenty of time to work on memorizing the digits because she has a large gap between classes - 10:45 a.m. until 2:30 p.m.

"My brain works weird; I look for patterns even though there are no patterns; I can find weird, bizarre patterns that make sense to me," Baker said.

Baker defended her title against five other participants.

With about 40 people gathered in the Building B Rotunda, the first contestant, Patricia Kelley of Lake Placid, set the bar high by correctly naming 115 digits of pi.

"I wouldn't go after her," a girl spectator said. "I'd quit."

No one quit, but no one bested Kelley.

Alex Wheaton came the closest with 86 and Thomas Underwood recited 83 digits correctly.

Coming in fifth with 40, Baker said, "there's always next year."

Kelley received a calculator, a gift certificate for a Village Inn pie and a pi plate, which is a plate with {pi} in the middle and about 30 digits of pie around the rim.

Kelley has been studying the pi digits since the middle of February.

"Every time I drive and stop at a red light, I would recite what I have memorized," she said.

She had 150 digits memorized, but forgot one number during the competition, Kelley said.

The Math Department conducted the numeric recitation challenge and the English Department reviewed the pi writings. A three-way tie was declared among the two faculty essays and a student's poem.

Pi is an irrational number, meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. With the use of computers, pi has been calculated to more than one trillion digits past the decimal.

The first Pi Day Celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988.

If you want to celebrate the "moment" of pi, take it to seven decimal places - 3.1415926 - which can be interpreted as March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m.

If you haven't had your fill of pi by now, check out piday.org for heaps of info and pi listed to one million decimal places.

Pi - 3.14159... it goes on and on without end.

Highlands Today reporter Marc Valero can be reached at 863-386-5826 or mvalero@highlandstoday.com

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