Pi...

When I arrived I was told that one of my tenth grade students, Hector, is an academic stand-out. I realized after the first week that he is highly motivated and that he does excellent work but I continued to question the even higher level that his other teachers placed him on.

Then Pi occured. We were reviewing Pi (http://www.math.com/tables/constants/pi.htm) and I mentioned that engineers were happy remembering 3.14 but that mathematicians liked to be more accurate and remember more digits. I then jokingly mentioned that the students could earn a 100 bonus points if they could memorize Pi out to 100 digits.

Two days later Hector showed up to class ready for the challenge. He wrote the number out on the board to 100 digits from memory. I immediately recognized a recurring pattern every 12 digits so I asked how he'd determined Pi. He showed me ten sheets of long division he'd done in which he had divided the diameter of a circle into its circumference out to 100 digits. The limited number of significant figures he'd used for his circumference is what caused the 12 digit pattern to occur. We had a brief discussion on Pi being a transcendental number due to its lack of a repeating pattern and that was the end of it.

But it wasn't... he came in two days later, handed me a page printed from the internet with Pi printed out on it with the correct 100 digits and he then proceeded to write it out on the board from memory.

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679

Folks, I don't know how he did it. He didn't miss one number! There is nothing in his character that would cause me to believe he cheated.

Hector excels in English (I'll publish an essay he wrote another day) and all of his other subjects. He started a chess club and plays soccer and basketball with the rest of us. So if there is someone out there who wants to host Hector for a year in a study-abroad capacity he definitely deserves the opportunity!