Memorising Pi

Way back in March last year, Woodstock high school students participated in the annual "memorising pi" competition. We discovered recently that two of our Grade 11 students, Shotaro Yamauchi (Japan) and Ananya Kejriwal became official world top-rankers for their countries, having memorised pi respectively to 785 and 740 digits. That puts them fifth and sixth in Asia, and 42nd and 43rd in the world. Incidentally, the top four in the world are all Indian or Japanese, with an Indian the current record holder with - wait for it! - 43,000 digits. You can read the complete listings on the Pi World ranking List. There is a very informative Wikipedia article here. The world record holder is here listed as a Japanese engineer who managed 100,000 digits in October 2006.