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 is ubiquitous in the branch of mathematics known as statistics. The maximum height of what famous curve is equal to 1/sqrt(2*pi)?




2. 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?




3. In what year were the first 100 digits of pi first calculated?




4. Consider the following series of natural numbers, constructed by taking successively larger strings of digits from the beginning of the decimal expansion of the number pi:
3, 31, 314, 3141, 31415, 314159, 3141592, etc.
Out of the first 1000 numbers in this series, how many are primes? (for example, the first two numbers, 3 and 31, are both primes)




5. 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?
eve@eveandersson.com