The Pi Trivia Game

by Eve Andersson

     

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. A famous book contains the following paragraph, implying that pi=3:

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about.

What book does this come from?





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




3. 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?




4. Which of the following binary numbers is closest in value to pi:




5. Answer the following question (an example of pi's importance in probability), posed and solved by George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (solved also nowdays by many students in introductory statistics classes): Let a needle of length L be thrown at random onto a horizontal plane ruled with parallel lines spaced by a distance d (greater than L) from each other. What is the probability that the needle will intersect one of these lines?





eve@eveandersson.com