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. The following are all mnemonics for remembering the first few digits of pi (the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of pi). Which of these was written in 1995 by Michael Keith?

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
in sacred truth and rigid spelling.
Numerical sprites elucidate
For me the lexicon's dull weight.
Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes inapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan, rivaled nevermore,
Who in his wondrous lore,Passed on before,Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
But a time I spent wandering in bloomy night; Yon tower, tinkling chimewise, loftily opportune.
Out, up, and together came sudden to Sunday rite,
The one solemnly off to correct plenilune.
How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. All of thy geometry, Herr Planck, is fairly hard.
Poe, E. -
Near A Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

2. For a given value of N: if you add up the first N decimals of pi (excluding the initial 3), the sum is 666 (not to imply that pi is at all satanic). What is the value of N?

144
169
148
123
121

3. If you were writing a computer program with the intention of breaking the world record for calculating the most digits of pi, why would it be foolish for you to use the well-known formula pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...?

it gives incorrect digits after the 875th decimal has been reached
it converges terribly slowly
it is more fun to use the Monte Carlo method
computers aren't good at doing such repetitive tasks as calculating series iterations
it would be too hard to implement this formula in any programming language

4. Say you have a rope wrapped tightly around the earth at the equator. How much longer would you have to make the rope if you wanted the rope to be exactly 1 foot above the surface the whole way around? (assume that the earth has a constant radius at the equator)

2*pi feet
2*pi*R feet, where R is the radius of the earth
pi*R^2 feet
pi + D feet, where D is the diameter of the earth
pi/2 feet

5. A famous book contains the following paragraph, implying that pi=3:

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about.

What book does this come from?

Homer's Odyssey
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Bible
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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