Wycliffe Prep School – Year 5 Pupil to Feature on ITV’s Good Morning Britain!

25 Jun 2019

Year 5 pupil Charley Thomas was invited to join Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain on 19th March 2019.

Charley began making headlines in the National Press this weekend after he wowed his peers in assembly by reciting pi to 220 decimal places.

Charley rehearsed at home all week with his family before reciting the number at Wycliffe Preparatory School as part of the celebration of Pi Day 2019. Charley’s astonishing achievement has not gone un-noticed, and he has now featured in over 20 newspapers across the nation, including The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Express.

A range of pi activities and challenges were organised for pupils to mark Pi Day of March 14 – “3.14” in American date notation. These included creating pi art, writing nonsense verse in “PiLish” and finding evidence of circular buildings.

Charley said: “I’m not very good at standing up and doing something in front of people so I was a bit nervous at assembly. I had rehearsed at home and knew I could get to 220 places. I really like Maths.”

The number is used in engineering, physics, super-computing and space exploration – because its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders.

According to the Pi World Ranking List website, which names Indian Suresh Kumar Sharma as the person to recite the most digits of pi at 70,030 in 2015, Charley places 451st in the world.

Headmaster, Adrian Palmer said: “This is an incredible achievement and one that no Wycliffe pupil has done before.  Charley received a standing ovation for his efforts in assembly and it was so richly deserved.”

Earlier this week, Google employee Emma Haruka Iwao broke the Guinness World Record for calculating pi to the most number of digits.  Her calculation to 31.4 trillion decimal places broke the previous record by nearly nine trillion digits.