By Ella Hopkins-Gianotti – Staff Reporter

Law recently celebrated National Pi Day with its annual Pi-lympics.

On March 6th and 7th, students from the National Math Honors Society (NMHS) came to every math class to have classes compete in the Pi-lympics for the chance to win the Pi-lympics trophy and a breakfast party. Five events took place this year. 

“We celebrate Pi Day because it is one of the most fascinating math numbers there is in math,” NMHS Advisor Mr. Ruzbarsky said. “It’s an irrational number that cannot be written as a fraction and is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter. As an Honor Society, we also celebrate it because it’s fun to do math and everyone else can enjoy math like we do.”

Mrs. Hull’s period 4 class was the winner of this year’s competition for the second year in a row. Their win was rewarded with a pancake breakfast party and the Pi-lympics trophy.

“I am so excited and proud of my class for winning the Pi-lympics again this year,” Hull said, “My class worked hard to prepare by memorizing pi and drawing circles. Ruz and the NMHS did a great job, as always, organizing the event this year, and all of the math classes showed great spirit and effort.”

This year, the NMHS decided to donate to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Two donation goals were met, leading to Ruzbarsky and math teacher Mrs. Francisco getting pied in the face on an episode of The Morning Briefing.

“This year we raised $470 to go to the St. Jude’s Foundation,” said Ruzbarsky 

There were a variety of games like Drawing the Best Circle, Guess How Many Are In A Jar, Memorizing Digits Of Pi, and Math and Pi Word Challenges. Students could get bonus points by baking a pie, by making pi-related art, and by donating.

“We had to come up with a few new competitions, one of them being the math challenges,” Senior NMHS Officer Madelyn Baranowsky said. “The Pi-lympics helps get everyone more involved with math and creates friendly competition.”

There were even a couple of competitions in which records were broken.

“Most notably, this year we had the most digits of consecutive Pi remembered broken this year with 136 – the previous record was 105,” Ruzbarsky said.

The students in Mrs. Hull’s Period 4 class took lots of time in preparation to get ready for the Pi-lympics.

“I memorized 75 digits of Pi,” freshman Emma Bonanno said. “I used ASAPSCINCE’s pi song. I liked learning the song because it was catchy.” 

This year, the games were run a bit differently than in previous years.

“Two years ago, we ran the Pi-lympics in the New Gym, inviting groups of math classes to come to the room together and move around to try all the activities,” NMHS President Deepika Chitarala said. “With this style, classes didn’t have a set amount of time, and collecting points was a little more complicated, instead this year, we opted to bring the events to the classrooms instead, allowing us to create a more controlled environment and even the playing field for all the math classes at Law.”

Since the games were set up in classrooms, each student was trying to get a better score than their peers.

“I got a 93% on the perfect circle game,” freshman Dylan Gaillard said. “I found it more fun because it was competitive.”

A new way of having the players compete in the competitions meant lots of planning from the NMHS.

“The NMHS officers spent a lot of time talking with Ruz and figuring out how to get everyone excited over this infinite number we call pi,” NMHS Officer Fiorella Gargiulo said. “We brainstormed ideas and ways to market the two block days to get everyone ready for one of my favorite parts of the year.”

Students and teachers participated in the events and all had an amazing time.

“My favorite part of the Pi-lympics is watching teachers and their students get super excited and nerdy over math,” Gargiulo said. “When people are bringing in baked goods or memorizing the digits of pi, it makes the event so much more fun.”