Daniel C. Luchansky of Plainsboro won the youth division, 13 and under Pi Recital Contest at Princeton Pi Day on Sunday, March 10, by reciting Pi to 1,092 places. A seventh grade student at Community Middle School, he is 12 years old.
“We heard about the contest from The News last year and Daniel came in third place,” says his father, Daniel A. Luchansky, a retired portfolio manager with Merrill Lynch and Blackrock. “He spent about a week working on memorizing 265 places. Knowing he wanted to do better this year, he spent more time working on it practicing on and off over the past couple of months.”
His father and mother, Sherri Andrews, an analyst and manager of mutual funds in the distressed debt, convertible, and equity sectors, moved to Plainsboro in 1985. The younger Daniel has lived here all his life.
“He memorized the numbers in groups of five, and practiced reciting them in what is known in musical terms as five four time meter signature,” says his father. “This is a notational convention in music describing how many beats are in each measure — exemplified by Dave Brubeck’s song ‘Take Five.’”
Not only does Daniel do math, but he has been playing piano for about nine years and loves to compose his own material. He has been competing in chess tournaments for close to three years and placed eighth in the NJ Grade School Championship seventh grade division a few months ago (his first year playing in the all state championship tournament).
He has mastered Rubik’s Cube. He is also an avid expert MineCraft player and administrator on multiple servers. Daniel is a first degree black belt attending East Coast Martial Arts Institute.
Here is the start of the sequence he memorized and recited at the competition.
3. 14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 58209 74944 59230 78164
To get a sense the magnitude of Daniel’s accomplishment, the remaining 1,022 digits of pi he memorized would require an additional 41 lines of space.
“Daniel’s math role models are John Von Neumann and Carl Gauss,” says his father. “Von Neumann, an original member of the Manhattan Project and Institute for Advance Study in Princeton was a pioneer in game theory and digital computing, among other things.”
