A five-year-old girl successfully repeated 3,020 digits after the decimal point of Pi in 30 minutes, which set a record for the most after-point digits a preschool child has been able to recite.
The girl’s parents said they would apply to the Guinness Book of World Records Shanghai office for her accomplishment.
Long Limin, the girl’s father said his daughter had spent only three months memorizing the 3,020 digits.
The father said he read an interesting report on Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and started to collect as many digits after the decimal point as he could on the Internet. He then turned to a mathematics professor at Shenzhen University who gave him more than 4,000 after-point digits.
The girl showed great interest in the figure as well, and studied the figure every morning, said the father. At the beginning, the girl spent an hour memorizing around 30 digits, and gradually 40 and 80 digits a day. She could now repeat more than 100 digits a day, said the father.
The girl’s target was to repeat more than 4,000 digits, said her father. The existing record in the Guinness Book of World Records was set by a child named Liu Beibei who repeated 1,997 digits at Nanjing University in Jiangsu Province on May 26, 1997, when she was aged 6.
(Shenzhen Daily January 21, 2005)
