This Utah State student is trying to break a world record you probably didn’t know existed

There are the world records you probably know about: The fastest runner (Usain Bolt) or the longest fingernails on a pair of hands (nearly 43 feet, on a Minnesota woman who hasn’t trimmed them since 1997).

And there are the ones you might hope to someday break yourself, like being the oldest person to have ever lived (122 years and 164 days).

Then there are the stranger ones: a record for the farthest distance walked barefoot on Lego bricks (a swear-worthy 5.5 miles) and the largest gathering of people wearing unicorn horns (334 almost-magical humans in West Virginia). A Utah man even carried the most bowling balls simultaneously (a striking 16 total).

Now, a student at Utah State University is trying to set a record you may have never heard of, at least depending on your aptitude for algebra.

Emmanuel Onyegu, a 28-year-old doctoral student at USU’s School of Teacher Education and Leadership, is trying to teach the longest-ever math class.

“It has always been my dream to break a Guinness World Record,” he said. “And I grew up loving mathematics … so I just thought, ‘This could be my record.’”

Onyegu’s dream has also traveled its own noteworthy distance to arrive at this moment.

He grew up in Nigeria, where he completed his master’s in applied mathematics. He had been teaching there for about six years when he decided he wanted to learn even more, particularly about the actual learning process.

So he set his sights on working with researchers outside of the country to get a Ph.D. focused on math education — a fitting degree to match his goal.

After looking at programs online, he settled on USU in Logan, which has one of the top research outputs in the country. The program there kept popping up on his computer screen over and over. And it helped, he said, that the school has a surprisingly connected group of about 25 Nigerian students, who have their own student association.

Onyegu arrived in Utah — more than 7,000 miles from his home — in fall 2024. One year later, during this past fall, he made his first attempt at breaking the record he’d set his sights on.

The title is currently held by a fellow countryman, Sanusi Kazeem, who taught math for a continuous 31 hours, 42 minutes and 54 seconds at Nigeria’s University of Ilorin in April 2025.

Onyegu decided he didn’t want to beat that by teaching for just 32 hours. He really wanted to surpass it. He first thought he’d try for a full two days (48 hours that might feel exponentially long).

Energy drinks + lots of whiteboards = necessities

Setting an official record that will be recognized by Guinness World Records, the global authority that documents and verifies the most extreme feats, is surprisingly complicated.

Before making an attempt, for instance, Onyegu had to apply with the organization and be approved. He submitted his application in spring 2025 and waited months to be officially accepted.

Guinness then sent him the guidelines for his targeted record — and a long list of the evidence he’d have to provide to prove if he’d made it.

“It’s really not that easy,” Onyegu said.

It’s a serious process that came from a slightly less serious start. The franchise that has become Guinness World Records started in Ireland in 1955, according to the organization’s history page.

Sir Hugh Beaver, who was then the managing director of Guinness Brewery, had gone to a shooting party for game birds. There, he and his friends argued over which bird was the fastest flyer in Europe and thereby the greater achievement to nab. No reference book provided the answer. (Guinness World Records thankfully settles that dispute now on its website: “The red-breasted merganser would be the most likely answer.”)

Beaver came to the idea of creating a book that could settle those kind of arguments and be sold at his pub to start conversation. He teamed up with twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were famed fact-finding researchers at the time.

Together, they pulled the first book together in much more time than the longest math class: about 3,645 hours total of work across the three of them.

Onyegu likes that research origin of the enterprise and, like with solving a math problem, that every record must be measurable, verifiable and standardized, according to Guinness’s own set rules. The organization also doesn’t approve anything that could cause harm, and several such records have been discontinued over the years.

For his own attempt at the longest math class, Onyegu was required to have witnesses who could fill out log books, multiple official timekeepers and video evidence to prove the attempt. Luckily for him, math lessons haven’t been proven to actually hurt anyone. Plus he has the extra bragging rights to say that during his long teaching attempt: “Nobody fell asleep either.”

About 30 students from USU attended, as well as more students and friends who joined via a livestream online. Many wore pajamas, but most attentively scribbled notes as he taught while sipping at the supply of Monsters and Red Bulls stashed in the classroom for the event. Shiny blue snack wrappers from granola bars also filled the wastebaskets.

Onyegu went through basic to advanced mathematics sequentially, building on the history of math as he worked through addition and subtraction to equations and variables. Geometry came in the middle. Then he talked through coefficients and constants up to calculus.

“We took a lot of time to talk about some of those concepts,” Onyegu said. “It has to stack up to make sense.”

To explain simple and compound interest, for instance, he first instructed on percentages. And for all of it, Onyegu said, he tried to make it interactive and engaging.

“It was not the normal way of teaching mathematics, like talking and facing the board,” he said — though he did fill six separate sliding whiteboards several times over in the USU auditorium where he taught.

He would ask students what variable they wanted to solve for: X or Y? And he would brainstorm with them on the best way to find the value of the hypotenuse.

Throughout the clips online — which are just parts of the full attempt, as it’s too long to post in one video on YouTube — you can hear Onyegu cheering students on, saying, “That’s correct. That’s correct.”

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t one-sided,” he added, which was part of why he believes he was able to keep the class awake for the full instruction.

Michelle Frierson, Onyegu’s mentor and an assistant professor of mathematics education at USU, said many of the faculty went to cheer him on or tuned in online.

“When we went over, it was fun to see the students were actually following along with him on the lesson,” she said. “They were fist-bumping and high-fiving when they got the questions right.”

A miscalculation with the clock

Large digital clocks at the front of the room let Onyegu see his progress in real time, ticking up from zero with the seconds, minutes and hours — and after passing 24 hours, the days — he’d been teaching.

One hour and 8 minutes in, he was explaining the rules of parentheses in math questions. He remembered noticing the numbers in front of him when he hit four hours on the dot. At 10 hours, he saw a paper someone had dropped on the floor for him to see; it said, “You are amazing. Keep it up.”

At one point, his parents in Nigeria showed up on the livestream, and Onyegu choked back tears.

“They are a world away joining the stream,” he said. “That was a very great and emotional moment for me.”

Members of USU’s Nigerian Student Association also came by.

Onyegu joked he didn’t do much to prepare himself for staying awake — no coffee or energy drinks. But he did fuel up on some of his favorite Nigerian jollof rice before teaching.

He also said the biggest challenge was maintaining his speaking voice so he didn’t lose it partway through the attempt.

Every two hours, too, the Guinness World Records rules allowed the class to take a 10-minute break. That time still counts toward the total for the overall lesson. And if you don’t take a full 10 minutes during one break, you can carry over the time left for another one.

That means, for example, if you only stop for seven minutes in one break, you can use 13 minutes in another. But if you go over at all, it disqualifies the full attempt.

And it was a small calculation error there that derailed Onyegu’s first go at the record title.

His class started at 8 a.m. on Nov. 21 and went for the full 16 hours remaining in the day. The class then continued for the entire 24 hours of Nov. 22. And it ended 17 minutes into Nov. 23.

The total time for the attempt was 40 hours and 17 minutes — far surpassing the current record of 31 hours and 42 minutes.

When Onyegu saw the current record time flash on the digital clocks, he remembered feeling excited. And when his final time was frozen in the numbers in front of him, he was even more elated.

“I just thought ‘I’ve done it,’” he said.

But when Onyegu submitted the evidence to Guinness, the review team came back to him and said he’d gone over his allotted time by two minutes during one break. And they won’t deduct it from the total to still let the attempt qualify.

Onyegu said it was crushing to hear, especially since he thought he’d watched the clocks so closely and carefully.

Formulating his next attempt

Guinness World Records did say Onyegu could submit the attempt under another title.

He’s proposing it for the most mathematics topics taught in one lesson (25). That’s currently being reviewed.

And he also plans to attempt the record he still wants to break again.

This time, he wants to have an official Guinness representative come out to USU for the attempt, which means real-time monitoring and checks, instead of having to submit evidence later; and if he succeeds, he’ll be declared the new record-holder on the spot. But that costs about $15,000. Onyegu is currently trying to find an organization to sponsor it.

In the meantime, he’s continuing to hone his teaching. He has a YouTube channel called Emmanuel Maths Academy where he posts lessons on math.

He’s already got hundreds of videos there where you can learn about the chain rule method of differentiation or the multiplication of a matrix.

Onyegu also wants to translate each lesson into several languages, so they’re more accessible worldwide. Math, he says, is the most universal language, and he wants students anywhere to be able to learn it.

“Sometimes when people say math is difficult or they’re afraid of math, I get surprised,” he said. “I believe that anyone can learn mathematics.”

He said that’s part of why he wanted to do the Guinness World Records attempt in the first place: to teach math in an approachable way so students can understand it, so no one is stressing, sweating or scared.

Frierson said the faculty and the department in math education are proud of Onyegu and will support his next attempt. Although this time, they might suggest a room with even more whiteboards to save some effort for Onyegu having to erase to make more space for equations.

Onyegu wants to someday teach math at a university once he finishes his Ph.D. He said he loves the subject because there’s usually an exact right answer. And he knows he’ll eventually find the right formula for teaching the world’s longest math class, adding his name to the more than 53,000 records that Guinness keeps.

Cue the world’s biggest round of applause.

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