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. 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?

pi*d^2
pi*d*L
3d/(pi*L)^2
2L/(d*pi)
e^(pi*i*d*L)

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

Pi > e.
No pattern exists in pi's digits.
Pi is irrational.
The area of a circle is equal to pi times the square of its radius.
It's fun to recite digits of pi.

4. For many years, it has been conjectured but unproven that pi is normal in base 10. What does normal mean?

Like any normal person, pi has two legs.
Blocks of digits of increasing size have a limit frequency of 1/10 for each of the digits (0 to 9).
Pi squared is a rational number.
People who like pi are normal.
The natural logarithm of pi taken to the tenth power is an integer.

5. 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?

Homer's Odyssey
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Bible
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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