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 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.

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. 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".

4. 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.

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