Lambrook House Maths Challenge
On Tuesday 12th March, six students from Year 4 had the privilege of taking part in a local Maths Challenge organised by Douglas Buchanan at Lambrook School.
In total 42 teams took part in an afternoon of Maths challenges, puzzles, investigations, tangrams and dominoes. After 90 minutes of brain boggling fun, the boys waited anxiously for the results during the prize giving.
The St Edward’s team (Dylan and Baichen) came 8th, which was particularly pleasing as due to traffic on route, they had missed part of the first round. The other teams also worked very well together and demonstrated collaboration and problem-solving skills. A fantastic afternoon of mathematics for St Edward’s – well done, boys!
Mrs Hunt
The value of the number pi has been calculated to a new world record length of 31 trillion digits, surpassing the previous record of 22 trillion.
Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee from Japan, found the new digits. Pi is the number you get when you divide a circle’s circumference by its diameter. The first digits, 3.14, are well known but the number is infinitely long. Extending the sequence of digits in pi is very difficult because the number follows no set pattern.
The calculation required 170TB of data (200,000 music tracks take up 1TB) and took 25 virtual machines 121 days to complete.
It would take 332,064 years to say the 31.4 trillion-digit number.
Pi is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration, it could not function without it!
Examples:
- Calculating the size of a parachute required to send a rover down on to the surface of Mars
- Working out how many rectangular camera images will be needed to map the surface of a planet
- Getting spacecraft to brake at just the right time to enter orbit around planets
Now that’s problem solving!