The Pi Trivia Game

by Eve Andersson

     

Home : Pi : The Pi Trivia Game

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 physicist Willebrord Snellius (1580-1626) found polygons which better approximated the perimeter of circles than do inscribed and circumscribed polygons. Better perimeter approximations lead to more quickly converging pi approximations. What scientific discovery is Snellius best known for?
the laws of reflection and refraction
general relativity
exploding pop-tarts
the photoelectric effect
the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics

2. 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.

3. How does one convert pi in base 10 to base 2?
Keep only the '0' and the '1' in the decimal expansion.
It is impossible because pi > 2.
Replace each digit of pi in base 10 with a 0 if it is divisible by 2 and with and 1 if it is not.
Successively multiply pi by 2 and put a '1' when it is greater than 1 and a '0' when it is smaller than 1. Repeat this step after having kept only the fractional part of the result.
Divide pi in base 10 by 5.

4. What is another name for pi in Germany?
el numero bueno
die Ludolphsche Zahl
Gesundheit
die Eulersche Zahl
Drei

5. 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
eve@eveandersson.com