St John’s learner breaks African record for reciting over 3 000 digits of pi.
Douglas Brown broke both the South African and the African record for reciting 3 004 digits of pi from memory.
St John’s College learner Douglas Brown will go down in the history books for breaking both the South African and African record for reciting 3 004 digits of pi from memory.
The endeavour, which took place on World Pi Day, took 45 minutes of deep concentration, breaking the South African record of 1 500 digits and the African record of 2 086 digits.
Douglas explained that his father is a memory coach.
“I started memorising digits of Pi in Grade 7 when I only did 50. And then in Grade 8 there was Pi Day at school and so I did 600. And then I increased by 600 every year.”
“I used something called the Major System in relation to the Room Method to memorise the digits in preparation. And then it’s just practice and repetition, I guess.”
Douglas said that he knew he would break the South African record as he could comfortably get to 2 400 and the rest was a bonus.
Head of mathematics at St John’s College Dr Stephen Sproule explained that reciting the digits of pi gives learners a sense of the infinite and special nature of irrational numbers.
“In each class, the person who can recite the most digits wins a prize. This year, the prize was a Covid mask with the Greek symbol for pi printed on the front,” said Sproule.
He described Douglas’ achievement as exceptional. “Recalling just a few hundred is a lot of work but recalling over 1 000 requires special memory techniques and a lot of time practising the recall process.”
Douglas says that he is now done with pi and will aim for Grand Master Memory, where he has to memorise a deck of cards in two minutes, 1 000 random digits in an hour and then 10 decks of cards in one hour using the Major System in relation to the Room Method.
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