Recitation of Pi raises funds for CAFOD

Published on isbi School News dated Friday 21st of December 2012

Mathematicians at St Benedict's School, Ealing have come up with a novel way of raising money for CAFOD a Recitation of π. Maths Teacher Stefan Scicinski organised this event with his Year 9 Set 1 class. The challenge for the pupils was to memorise as many digits of π as possible and to be sponsored for each digit.
The whole class stood and chanted the digits, with pupils sitting when they couldn't remember any more. The last one standing was Rebecca Walker who recited 260 digits, smashing the previous school record of 221, set eight years ago. As a double check, the pupils then, in pairs, verified each other's totals. Louis Delsol was second with 90 digits and Marcin Scicinski third with 71 digits. Others who remembered 50 digits or more were Hal Pelling (63), Ben Ainslie and Emilia Stefanowicz (51). Top sponsorship collector was Marcin Scicinski.
Rebecca only started learning the digits two days before the event. However, she was determined to break the record and, as she read over the π printout and practised her recitation, she realised that she could do way more than 221.
The total sponsorship money raised was a fantastic £1058.09. Maggie Beirne, a CAFOD Westminster Schools volunteer, came to St Benedict's on Monday 17th December to witness the recitation and collect the cheque.

The first 100 decimal digits of π are 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 58209 74944 59230 78164 06286 20899 86280 34825 34211 70679
Π is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be expressed as a fraction. Its decimal representation never ends and never repeats. (info from Wikipedia).