High school freshman memorizes 200 digits of equation

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) - Students memorize hundreds of facts for classwork, but one Elkhart Memorial High School student took it upon himself to commit 200 digits to memory.

Ryan Cart, a freshman, memorized 200 digits of the mathematical constant pi.

Cart said he began the process of memorizing the 18th-Century mathematical equation relating a circle's diameter to its circumference about two years ago after seeing the number in a magazine.

"I was really bored at one point. I saw it in a magazine and I decided to start learning it," he said. "It was just entertainment."

Cart's memorization came in handy Tuesday on March 14, also called Pi Day, because the value of pi begins 3.14.

According to Cart, his favorite subject is math and he is currently enrolled in two math classes. In one of them he was asked to write pi's value on the board. His classmates looked on in amazement as he kept going.

"They thought it was pretty cool. They like it," he said.

He returned to each of the teacher's classes the rest of the day to write pi.

Cart said he has not had to use the 200-digit value of pi for any equations because the school rounds the value to 3.14. But on his own he has used longer pi values to run calculations.

Cart said that the trick he used to memorize it was to break it down into segments and commit them to memory.

"I used constant repetition to learn it. I would take three to five digit chunks and then repeat it over and over," he said.

While Cart's memorization of pi is impressive, it falls well short of the Guinness Book of World Records, which says that an Indian man recited 70,000 digits of pi over nearly 10 hours in 2015.

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Source: The Elkhart Truth, http://bit.ly/2m78XeP

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Information from: The Elkhart Truth, http://www.elkharttruth.com