Nergis Teke closed her eyes and began reciting the numbers of Pi. “3.1415...
About two minutes later she was done. The 14-year-old had memorized 447 digits.
Asked how she was able to accomplish such an astonishing feat, the Lenape eighth grader said, “This might sound weird,” but one thing that helped was imagining the digits between two of the same numbers “eating each other.”
She also spent some of her free time logging in to her computer and repeating the numbers “over and over in my head to help them stay in my brain.”
Nergis’s amazing memorization skill started as a young child when she played flash card memory games with her mom. “She was competitive and I liked to beat her,” she said with a smile.
Lenape teacher Angelo Menta introduced the Pi Day contest to the school this year, challenging students to see how many digits of Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, they could memorize. They only had about 10 days to prepare.
“Nergis blew it out of the water,” said Menta. The runner up recited 101.
In the Pi World Ranking List, Nergis would rank 152nd in all of North America, among all ages, Menta said. She’s considering whether she’d like Menta to enter her name into the prestigious list.
“I feel like I accomplished something,” said Nergis, softly. Next year, “I’d like to set a higher goal, maybe 1,000.”
Nergis received an award for her achievement and Menta and another teacher treated her and two of her friends to pizza as a “mini field trip.”
Not surprisingly, the teen is in the highest math class offered eighth graders at the Doylestown Borough school, geometry and trigonometry. “I love math; it’s my favorite subject,” she said. “I want to be a math teacher when I grow up.”
“I don’t really know what one can use Pi for, but it’s the ability there,” that’s so amazing, Menta said. “Whatever she does, she’s incredible.”
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