The Pi Trivia Game
part of Pi Land

Finally this is your chance to pay tribute to the magnificent transcendental number that we have all grown to love! Test your knowledge of history, mathematics, and even a little physics.

Here are 25 (given to you 5 at a time) fun pi-related questions, picked randomly from my exciting pi question database! Get ready for the thrill of your lifetime, the ultimate challenge, The Pi Trivia Game!

Pi Flower
1. 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.

2. 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)

3. 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)
48
34
4
21
58

4. Which of the following binary numbers is closest in value to pi:
11.0010010000111111
101.110101000111100
10.0001101010110100
1.10111011010010011
111.010111101011111

5. Pi is transcendental. What does it mean for a number to be transcendental?
It is equal to the ratio of two integers.
It cannot be expressed as the solution of any polynomial with integer coefficients.
It is Ralph Waldo Emerson's favorite number.
Its square root is equal to -1.
Its decimal expansion is infinite in length.

eve@eveandersson.com