Teen shocks school on Pi Day: Serves up 1234 digits, slices through ...

LAKE WORTH BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — A junior from Park Vista High School served up over 1,200 digits of pi, slicing through the school's record.

Seventeen-year-old student, Logan Laker left his school astonished when he was able to list 1,234 digits of pi in a school-wide contest, breaking the original record of 314 digits.

"There was a contest to learn as many digits as we could, and I won," Laker responded.

Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π, or pi. It takes place on March 14 since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant figures in its decimal representation.

Laker said since learning about the contest, he's been memorizing the numbers for nearly three weeks. Before that, all Laker knew was 3.14159, six digits total. CBS12 News asked Laker how he was able to break the school's record by 920 words.

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"Everything can be sorted into higher levels, so I just broke numbers into groups, into sequences and codes that I could remember," Laker said. "I can memorize like 100 per day before my memory starts to plateau."

Laker wrote out 1,234 digits of pi. He said it took him 40 to 50 minutes to list all the digits during the contest at lunch in the courtyard. At one point, the school's fact sheet only went up to 1,000 digits. Laker said the school had to use a computer to fact-check the other 234 digits.

Laker was shown as the clear winner in the contest, and showcased a fraction of what he was able to memorize to CBS12 News.

"There were rumors in this class [someone] had memorized the first 600 and they'd been talking about that on the morning announcements for a couple weeks, and that was me," Laker said. "After I got to 600, I stopped talking about how much I knew because I wanted it to be more of a surprise when I showed up."