Ilyas Warshow of Park Community School set an unofficial record by reciting 4,949 digits of Pi in 17 minutes.
The teacher’s performance was one of numerous enjoyable events done at the school to commemorate World Pi Day, which is celebrated on March 14 each year to honor Pi’s first three digits (3.14).
Ilyas said: ‘At Park Community, we make these days into big events for the kids.
‘The goal is to get them more interested in anything – being curious about things. It’s all about finding something you love.
‘It does seem to generate excitement about a subject.’
Children were challenged to calculate the circumference of cookies and memorize the first 20 digits of Pi, among other things.
‘Pi jokes were hidden all around the school, Dad jokes,’ Ilyas, who has been teaching at the school for over two years, continued.
‘If they got the card and took it to the teacher they got a reward. There were lots of students hunting for the jokes at the beginning of school.
‘It was definitely a good way to get the kids excited about the subject. They were really loving it, really interested.’
About a year ago, the 24-year-old math instructor began memorizing Pi.
He said: ‘I put loads of work into it.
‘I never realised I’d be good at it.
‘I like numbers and I’m quite an obsessive person, and I became really addicted to it.’
Ilyas devised a variety of revision techniques, including the use of patterns, the search for discrepancies, and the division of numbers into chunks similar to phone numbers.
After completing some investigation into memorisation, he discovered that if a list of numbers was linked to anything else in his memory, he was more likely to remember it.
According to the data reported in the Pi World Rankings list, Ilyas had hoped to recite 5,000 digits of Pi in the fastest time, but he made an error on the 4,950th number, despite smashing the record.
He said: ‘I was quite annoyed but realistically it was a pretty good performance, so I was pretty happy.
‘It’s about finding repetition, it’s about finding your flow.’
The article was paraphrased from the following: Portsmouth News, Emily Jessica Turner, Record-smashing maths teacher recites 4,949 digits of Pi from memory as Park Community School marks World Pi Day, https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/education/record-smashing-maths-teacher-recites-4949-digits-of-pi-from-memory-as-park-community-school-marks-world-pi-day-3612699