Pi. 3.14. For most of us, it’s just another irrational number on our calculator, and its only use is to help us calculate the circumference of a circle. But freshman Saroja Erabelli has memorized up to 1,020 digits after the dot.
Her motivation?
The 1st place prize in the Pi Contest at Longfellow Middle School: a custard pie – and yes, literally, a pie.
Ever since middle school, she has been a math pro. She was on the Virginia Team for Math Counts in 8th grade, a prestigious contest that requires quick solving of difficult problems.
Erabelli is in AP Calculus BC, a class packed with upperclassmen. “She is very quiet but driven, she has a very high level of math ability but is humble and fits right in with her class,” said Ms. Pamela Douglas, Erabelli’s Calculus teacher.
For Erabelli, math is just like computer games are for ‘normal’ teenagers. “I love Calculus,” she said, and she studies math for the sake of math.
Her favorite topic in math is number theory which deals with natural numbers and their properties.
Erabelli qualified to take the United States Junior Mathematics Olympiad exam, an honor given to only about 200 students in the nation.
She was picked out from over 60,000 students who took the preliminary exam. “Making the USA IMO team is the goal of my high school life,” she said.
IMO, International Math Olympiad, is a competition that is equivalent to the Olympics. Erabelli is also a nationally ranked chess player.
She placed 2nd in her first tournament in 2nd grade, and has since mastered this logical sport. Last summer, she played chess against three of her friends, blindfolded.
Her friends told Erabelli their moves, such as, “Rook to A4” or “Knight to D5,” and Erabelli told them hers; she won. How does she do this? “You just have to think,” said Erabelli.
On a Saturday in March, she had to drive back and forth between a chess tournament and the prestigious Fairfax County Regional Science Fair, where she won 1st place for her project on Computer Science.
Her project was on encryptions – the encoding of messages on computers so that only the sender and receiver can read the message – based on fractals. Fractals are geometric patterns that repeat infinitely and randomly, and can have messages encoded within them.
Erabelli encoded different messages using fractals, making them extremely difficult to crack. “Her project is pretty complicated, and is at the college level,” said Mr. Florin Cuc, Erabelli’s Computer Science teacher.
She is also a programmer for the Robotics Club, and has used Java to program a robot that shoots basketballs for an upcoming competition.
But, just like any other teenager, Erabelli likes to hang out with her friends, and not just to play chess. “I like to just walk around the neighborhood with my friends,” she said.