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Hazelwood West students and staff celebrate Pi Day with a memorization competition. The winner for a second year is freshman Crystal Naes (center), who remembered 199 digits. Sophomore Jake Richards ranked second, memorizing 163 digits. Contestants included junior Greg Leber, freshman Nick Phillips, junior Abdullah Darwech, sophomore Jake Richards, freshman Crystal Naes and juniorsMax Stolte, Will Brown and Andy During.

“My students today were laughing, saying that Pi Day is like Christmas in the math department,” teacher Elaine Harke remarked about comments from students at Hazelwood West High School. “We rejoice in our ‘geekiness.'”

Each year, teachers and student mathematicians celebrate March 14, the calendar date that represents the decimal 3.14—pi, the infinite number that never repeats itself. It is a phenomenon too impressive to go unnoticed.
Harke traded in her more traditional attire for a pi T-shirt and pi earrings. For her seniors, math lessons for the day involved students solving quadratic equations in terms of specific variables.

“They had to rearrange them all to say ‘r =.’ I brought in every formula that had pi in it—volume, surface area, spheres, cones and cylinders,” Harke said. Pi denotes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. “It took them a while to notice it was for Pi Day. They thought it was adorable.”

Classrooms at several district schools also incorporated pi into the day’s instruction.

At Cold Water Elementary School, Ann Saracino started the morning introducing pi into the vocabulary of her sixth-grade students. As lunch time approached, the students partook in a refresher activity.

To demonstrate the nature of pi, each child was assigned a number and he or she counted how many times it appeared in the first 40 digits of pi. Based on their results, Saracino gave the children an equal amount of colored paper squares to write down their number.

The teacher started with a large sheet of paper, taping 3.14 on a locker in the back of the classroom. As one student called out the succession of digits in pi, the students taped up their pi numerals in two rows.

By lunchtime, the kids were only about halfway through the first 40 digits. As the kids lined up for lunch, they extended their hands toward the teacher. Saracino squirted each palm with hand sanitizer.

Back at West, paper pi chains, pi bead bracelet-making and other activities during the day culminated with an annual Pi Day contest—students reciting as many digits of pi that they could memorize.

Several math classes met in the commons to watch and encourage the competitors.

The pacesetter was last year’s winner, Crystal Naes, who memorized 205 digits as an eighth-grader. It got her a write up in the Wall Street Journal.
“There is a trick to it. You remember 10 digits at a time, and then when you remember 10, you try to remember things that are familiar—like a phone number or addresses,” Naes explained. “I like to listen to music when I memorize.”

During two rounds of reciting, students rattled off numbers as a table full of judges followed along using pi keys until contestants missed a digit. When it was over, Naes was victorious for the second year in a row, correctly reciting 199 digits. Sophomore Jake Richards was the runner-up, memorizing 163 digits.

Richards said all of his extra work memorizing numbers came together when he earned a pie for pi. “Pie and glory—yeah, I did it for pie and glory” he said. (story courtesy of the Hazelwood Communications Dept.)

Sixth-graders Mallory Stevens and Trevon Ruffin post some of the digits of pi on lockers in their classroom. The students are in Ann Saracino’s class in Hazelwood School District’s Cold Water Elementary School.
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