Students put on thinking caps for Pi Day

Kate Miller spouted off a string of digits on Friday, punctuated only by an occasional “um” and “oh.”

The seventh-grader reached 200 digits — a personal best.

“That was amazing,” Meggen Stockstill, chair of the math department at Harbor Day School in Newport Beach told Kate.

To celebrate, the girl tucked into a slice of pie, a fitting way to mark National Pi Day, which is Saturday. The date 3/14/15 represents the first five digits in the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — otherwise known as pi.

Larry Shaw, a physicist at the San Francisco Exploratorium, is credited as being the first to celebrate the date, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Shaw even had a solid brass tribute to pi embedded in the second floor of the Exploratorium, which has become something of a mecca for pi lovers. In 2009, a congressional resolution designated March 14 as official Pi Day.

For the last 15 years, students at Harbor Day have marked the mathematical occasion by attempting to memorize and recite up to 10,000 digits of the irrational number.

Participation is voluntary, and students from kindergarten to eighth grade typically take part. And while no student has hit the 10,000 mark, this year seventh-grader Karina Grover recited 4100 digits in 15 minutes and 10 seconds. Her name will top the list in the school’s Pi Day Hall of Fame.

Stockstill said a 1999 visit to Exploratorium’s Pi Shrine gave her the idea for a school-wide celebration. Helped by her college-age son, she fashioned a pi shrine out of tin foil and a blanket from her childhood.

On Friday, students circled the homemade shrine as they belted out the words to “Oh Number Pi” (Oh number pi, Oh number pi, your digits are unending …).

“This is a very exciting day,” Stockstill said to the few dozen seventh-graders whose turn it was to recite the digits. Later in the day, Stockstill’s 3-year-old granddaughter even took a turn.

“Who knows why this is the Pi Day of the century?” Stockstill asked the students.

“Because it’s 3-1-4-1-5,” called out Marvella Marlo, who is 12.

This arrangement of dates won’t happen again for 100 years.