The Pi Trivia Game

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. 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

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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

5. 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.

eve@eveandersson.com