Pi Day at Chi Alpha

As most of you were com­plete­ly unaware, yes­ter­day was Pi Day.

If the ref­er­ence is con­fus­ing to you, yes­ter­day was March 14. This date can be writ­ten 3/14, and 314 are the first three dig­its of the infi­nite­ly-long num­ber pi.

Any­way, I made a ref­er­ence to Pi Day at the begin­ning of my mes­sage last night and I asked offhand­ed­ly if any­one in the audi­ence had pi mem­o­rized out to any sig­nif­i­cant length — more than 10 dig­its.

At first I did­n’t see any hands, but then I noticed that every­one was point­ing at some­one just out of my field of vision. I turned and John Sill­cox (pic­tured here) had his hand raised.

“John, how many dig­its do you have pi mem­o­rized out to?”

“100.”

“For real? You know the first 100 dig­its of pi?”

“Yeah.”

I was pret­ty floored. I had thought MAYBE some­one would know the first 10 or 25 dig­its.

“You know that I have no choice but to call you up here and have you recite them.”

After some cajol­ing he agreed and began recit­ing the num­bers. One of the graph­ics I had for pi day hap­pened to dis­play the first sev­er­al hun­dred num­bers and so we pro­ject­ed the graph­ic behind him while he rat­tled them off. His recall was per­fect.

Here’s the bit that I found most inter­est­ing about the entire expe­ri­ence: the response of the audi­ence. This is the sort of geeky thing that nor­mal­ly only I would find cool. But at Stan­ford, such dis­plays get a dif­fer­ent response. Our Chi Alpha group went wild. One of our rug­by play­ers got up and began bow­ing to John, cry­ing “We’re not wor­thy!”

So yeah. That’s what Pi Day at Chi Alpha is like. At least at Stan­ford.

For the record, my texts were Exo­dus 3:14 and Philip­pi­ans 3:14. 🙂