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. 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. 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)

3. The new world record for computation of the most digits of pi was achieved in September/October 1995 by Yasumasa Kanada at the University of Tokyo. It took 116 hours for how many digits to be computed?

72,373,112,000
903,728,000
31,415,926,535
6,442,450,000
1,000,000,000

4. What is another name for pi in Germany?

el numero bueno
die Ludolphsche Zahl
Gesundheit
die Eulersche Zahl
Drei

5. For many years, it has been conjectured but unproven that pi is normal in base 10. What does normal mean?

Like any normal person, pi has two legs.
Blocks of digits of increasing size have a limit frequency of 1/10 for each of the digits (0 to 9).
Pi squared is a rational number.
People who like pi are normal.
The natural logarithm of pi taken to the tenth power is an integer.

eve@eveandersson.com