Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Often when we talk about school students and pi, we think of the meat pie, like the famous Yatala pies in my electorate of Forde, but it is another pi that has been the focus of students at Windaroo Valley State High School. The other pi, the mathematical formula that pi approximately equals 22/7, represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The maths teacher at Windaroo Valley high school, Michael Gardiner, better known as the 'Pi Guy', started a competition around pi—an irrational number that, when expressed as a decimal, goes on to infinity.

Students had to remember as many digits as they could in the number pi, and there were some amazing results. Year 9 student Kahlos Oloapu won the competition by reciting 227 digits. He was followed by year 9's Jacinta Ferrier, who recited 157. Third place went to Ruben Kanafani, who remembered 58 digits. It's been reported that Kahlos and Jacinta apparently memorised more than 400 digits but couldn't get that far on the day.

Headmaster Leonard McKeown summed it up best:

The pi competition allowed a novel way for students to build memory skills to be able to achieve remarkable feats of mathematics by commitment and determination.

He was in awe of the results. Well done to everyone at Windaroo Valley State High School, and I look forward to next year's competition.

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