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. Among the digits of pi currently known, the concentrations of each of the digits 0 - 9 are pretty much equal. However, in the first 30 digits of pi's decimal expansion, one number is conspicuously missing. Which number is it?

7
2
0
8
6

2. Who, in 1706, first gave the Greek letter "pi" its current mathematical definition?

Albert Einstein
Olle the Greatest
William Jones
Archimedes
Max Planck

3. What rapidly converging formula for calculation of pi was found by Machin in 1706?

pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...
pi/4 = 4 * arctan (1/5) - arctan (1/239)
e^(i*pi) = -1
pi = 3 (close enough)
pi = 4 * arctan 1

4. 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

5. 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.

eve@eveandersson.com