The Pi Trivia Game

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!

1. What is the value of e^(i*pi)?

the square root of -1
approximately 10
pi squared
-1
1.414

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. 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?

the laws of reflection and refraction
general relativity
exploding pop-tarts
the photoelectric effect
the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics

4. Among the digits of pi currently known, the concentrations of each of the digits 0 - 9 are pretty much equal. However, in the first 30 digits of pi's decimal expansion, one number is conspicuously missing. Which number is it?

7
2
0
8
6

5. One way to approximate the value of pi is to have a computer pick two random numbers, x and y, each between -1 and 1. If it does so N times, and if, for M of those times x^2 + y^2 < 1, then pi is approximately equal to 4*M/N (presumably becoming more accurate as N increases). This method of approximation is an example of:

the Windelius algorithm
squaring the circle
the Monte Carlo method
guessing
calculation of an infinite series

eve@eveandersson.com