There is no school math test that will require you to know the digits of Pi, except as a silly extra credit question.
The fascination is just dick measuring. "I'm smarter than you", for memorizing a longer string? It's quite dumb, but American media loves to use the dumbest possible ways of demonstrating that a character is intelligent, because uh it's really really hard to demonstrate "This person is very intelligent" to a subset of the population that is mostly at a middle school reading level and barely comprehends basic arithmetic, let alone algebra.
Agreed. The schools always seem to have these learning adjacent things that are theoretically supposed to make subjects engaging, but in reality are so disconnected from the subject that they are meaningless.
Even the games/puzzles from Martin Gardner are a much better solution than memorizing a random... string. Because pi is not about 3.1415... but a proportion.
The fascination is just dick measuring. "I'm smarter than you", for memorizing a longer string? It's quite dumb, but American media loves to use the dumbest possible ways of demonstrating that a character is intelligent, because uh it's really really hard to demonstrate "This person is very intelligent" to a subset of the population that is mostly at a middle school reading level and barely comprehends basic arithmetic, let alone algebra.