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. Which of the following binary numbers is closest in value to pi:

11.0010010000111111
101.110101000111100
10.0001101010110100
1.10111011010010011
111.010111101011111

2. One way to calculate the value of pi is to find the perimeter of polygons inscribing and circumscribing a circle. The circumference of the circle lies in between those two values, and the values approach pi as the number of sides of the polygon approaches infinity. Who originated this method of pi approximation?

Archimedes of Syracuse
Plato
Pythagoras
Socrates
Murray Gell-Mann

3. 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.

4. Pi shows up many places in physics, including simple harmonic motion. Given a simple pendulum of length h, what is the period for a small oscillation (the period is the time it takes to complete one full oscillation)?

3c/(pi*h^2), where c is the speed of light
2*pi*sqrt(h/g), where g is the gravitational constant
e^(pi*h), where e is the base of the natural logarithm
h/pi
(27*pi^2)/(h*[g^2]*[e*c]^3)

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