CLAS dean and student featured in story highlighting National Pi Day

Detroit News columnist Neal Rubin featured a story on National Pi Day (March 14), and Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Wayne Raskind.

To commemorate the event, Wayne State crafted a funny video that as of Thursday morning had been viewed by nearly 380 people. It starts with university employee Mario Chaney asking his waitress at the campus diner what she has in the way of pie. Seated to his right, "Raskind looks up and begins reciting: "3.14159 26535 89793 23846," and then to Chaney's left, Wayne State chemistry student Stephanie Godden takes over.

She can recite pi to 2,300 places, and before long, a chorus of customers is making Chaney wish he'd ordered cake. At the age of 14, Raskind could recite from memory the first 1,220 digits of pi. Rolling out numbers until classmates' eyes glazed over "was not exactly a ticket to social respectability," he says.

The important thing for Raskind, he says, was to realize "I could do something at a world-class level. That helped me when I went into mathematics and was competing against some of the smartest people in the world."