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. 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)?




2. What is the volume of a sphere (3-dimensional, not a hypersphere) [r = radius]?




3. The following are all mnemonics for remembering the first few digits of pi (the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of pi). Which of these was written in 1995 by Michael Keith?




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?




5. What 1768 proof about pi is the German mathematician Johann Lambert famous for?





eve@eveandersson.com