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. 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

2. The world pi-recitation record is held by Chao Lu of China. He was able to recite pi from memory to approximately how many decimal places?

Six thousand.
Seventeen million.
Three hundred fourteen thousand one hundred fifty nine.
Five hundred.
Sixty-eight thousand.

3. Which of the following is NOT equal to pi?

4 * the integral from 0 to 1 of sqrt(1 - x^2)dx
4 * arctan 1
the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter
(3/4) * the number of radians in a 270 degree angle
2 * the number of radians in a right angle

4. 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

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

Albert Einstein
Olle the Greatest
William Jones
Archimedes
Max Planck

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