Masuk Free Press

With February now over, basketball fans are prepping for March Madness, the sport’s most important event of the year. Yet a select group of Masuk’s community is getting ready for a more recent addition to the calendar: Pi Day.

Named for the mathematical constant, Pi Day falls on Mar. 14 of each year. This reflects the first three digits of the term, 3.14. The first celebration devoted to Pi Day took place in 1988, and its popularity has only grown since then. It was declared a national holiday after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2009. Masuk High School has been honoring pi since 2007, with students memorizing thousands of numbers over the years.

“It’s a pi-reciting competition,” said Math Team president, Evan Boyle. “If you want, you’re able to participate, and you recite as many digits of pi as you can. The winner, whoever can recite the most, gets to have a whipped cream pie, and they get to pie whoever they choose.”

Participation in the annual Pi Day contest is no small feat. With an infinite amount of digits to tackle, students are working their hippocampi to get in shape for this event.

“Personal best, at my peak, it was like 25. So, not very high,” said vice president of Math Team, Rayhaan Shaik, in reference to the number of digits he had memorized. “But I’m going to shoot for at least 150.”

When working with such a high-profile term, one might wonder how it is possible to tackle more than a handful of digits. The brain can only keep track of about seven pieces of information at once, after all. But there are individuals who have worked around this human flaw. Now, there exist a wide variety of tactics that can be used to commit this esteemed decimal to memory.

“You have songs, you have memory games,” said Shaik. “I know Google’s calculator game has a memory game.”

While some use these more traditional routes of putting the numbers to a catchy tune, these are others who chose a different method.

“I remember there was a student a couple years ago who memorized one digit every day until his senior year,” said Boyle.

Regardless of the way that you devote your time and energy to the number, everyone can find something to enjoy on Pi Day.