The Pi Trivia Game

by Eve Andersson

     

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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. Are pi's digits periodic?
Yes; the digits repeat themselves after every 6000 decimal places.
No; only women, not numbers, are unfortunate enough to be periodic.
Maybe; not enough digits of pi have yet been calculated to know if they start eventually repeating themselves.
Yes; every infinitely long number has to start repeating itself sometime.
No; every periodic number is rational, but pi is irrational.

2. One of the best-known series representations of pi is the Gregory-Liebniz formula, which is:
pi = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ...
pi = arctan 1 + arctan 1/3 + arctan 1/5 + ...
pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...
pi/6 = 1 - 2/3 + 1/5 - 2/7 + ...
pi = 3 + .1 + .04 + .001 + .0005 + ...

3. Who, in 1706, first gave the Greek letter "pi" its current mathematical definition?
Albert Einstein
Olle the Greatest
William Jones
Archimedes
Max Planck

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. 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
eve@eveandersson.com