The Pi Trivia Game

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Finally this is your chance to pay tribute to the magnificent transcendental number that we have all grown to love! Here are 25 questions (given to you 5 at a time), picked randomly from my pi question database. Get ready for the thrill of your lifetime, the ultimate challenge, The Pi Trivia Game!

1. Simon Plouffe has recently derived an algorithm for calculating pi in hexadecimal. Remarkably, this formula allows one to calculate the nth decimal of pi without calculating the previous digits. Incidentally, Plouffe was listed in the 1975 Guinness Book of World Records. For which of the following accomplishments was he listed?

calculating 3 trillion digits of pi with a Cray supercomputer
walking 1002 miles with a jar of pickles balanced on his head
reciting 4096 digits of pi from memory
baking the world's largest pie, so perfectly round that its circumference divided by its diameter gave pi to an accuracy of over 300 decimal places
world chess champion

2. There was a time (a while ago) when people were trying very hard to 'square the circle.' It was said at the time that it was even an illness and a name was given to it. What is it?

Squarerootofpitis
Impossibilus Fittis
Morbus Cyclometricus
WileECoyotisandRoadRunneritis
Repetitionatis Decimalus

3. The world pi-recitation record is held by Chao Lu of China. He was able to recite pi from memory to approximately how many decimal places?

Six thousand.
Seventeen million.
Three hundred fourteen thousand one hundred fifty nine.
Five hundred.
Sixty-eight thousand.

4. Which French mathematician said in 1909 that it is hopeless to think that we could ever check if there are 10^100 consecutive zeroes in the decimal expansion of pi?

Félix-Édouard-Justin Émile Borel
René Baire
Felix Klein while looking at his cat.
Felix Klein while looking at his cat in his bottle.
Möbius while walking on a strip of stamps.

5. If one were to find the circumference of a circle the size of the known universe, requiring that the circumference be accurate to within the radius of one proton, how many decimal places of pi would need to be used?

2 million
39
11
48,000
300

eve@eveandersson.com