There are nerds, and then, there are math nerds, who are generally in a class by themselves.
Math nerds are bright people with a fascination for numbers that you just can't teach. You could spot them in high school via the pocket protectors for their calculators and their tendency to flap their arms in class when they know the answer.
Math nerds often get put down a lot by the rest of us who haven't the foggiest idea what all the excitement's about. Although we'd never admit it, there's a pure streak of envy among us artsy types who'd secretly like the chance to be math nerds: if we only had the brains, nerve and heart to be wizards of odds.
All of which brings me to the case of Sasha Ramani, a 17-year-old Grade 12 student at Gordon Graydon Secondary School who is a self-confessed math guy, and knows how to have fun with it.
His picture was in The News a couple of weeks ago accompanying a story on the chess club he helped form at Graydon.
His mother Chitra sent along a thank-you note for the story that casually mentioned that Sasha has also been recognized for another accomplishment at Graydon, reciting the first 251 digits of Pi.
If you go to www.joyofpi.com, you can revisit your nightmares about high school math or have yourself a ball going over the first 10 thousand digits that are published on the site, depending on your point of view. We are assured that the book of the same name contains a million digits. Whew!
Sasha was sitting in Roy Spencer's math class last year when the Graydon teacher mentioned that the math holiday for nerds, Pi Day, was coming up. It's March 14 to go with the first three digits of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which starts 3.14. That's as far as most of us ever got.
Spencer mentioned that one of his students once memorized the first 120 digits of the answer. That was waving the red flag in
front of Sasha who already knew the first 20. When he came back after last March break, he smashed the school record.
"A lot of people tend to dislike calculus," Sasha says. "But I really appreciate it."
Of course, when you get 98 in a course it tends to become one of your favourites.
Did you know there's a Pi hand symbol? Yeah, Sasha not only knows it, he has digital pictures of himself flashing it on the streets of Port Credit.
Last summer, his parents took their vacation to tour Ivy League schools to check out the various campuses. Right now, Sasha, who has a mid-90s average, says his first choice for post-secondary studies is math and business administration at the University of Waterloo.
If there's any justice in the world, before his high school career ends Sasha will have to go down to the office because he's forgotten the combination to his locker.