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. 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

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. What professor was dismissed from his position in 1934 for teaching in an "un-German" style after saying (correctly) that pi/2 is the value of x between 1 and 2 for which cos x vanishes?

J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kip Thorne
Scott Adams
Elias Bröms
Edmund Landau

4. What rapidly converging formula for calculation of pi was found by Machin in 1706?

pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...
pi/4 = 4 * arctan (1/5) - arctan (1/239)
e^(i*pi) = -1
pi = 3 (close enough)
pi = 4 * arctan 1

5. 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.

eve@eveandersson.com