Pi Day 2025

The first recorded use of π as a mathematical symbol comes from the Welsh mathematician William Jones in Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, in which he abbreviated the Greek περιϕέρεια, to its first letter: π.

What does the Greek word, περιϕέρεια, translate to?

• petal

• periphery

• pie

• circle

Rounded to the nearest whole number, what it the area of a circle with radius 1?

• 1

• 2

• 3

• 4

Answer explanation

• 1500's

• 1600's

• 1700's

• 1800's

Over 40 centuries ago, who was very likely the first to use a value for pi to calculate the area of a circle?

• Mesopotamia

• Greece

• Zach Wall

• Persia

What are the first 7 digits of Pi?

• 3.145087

• 3.142936

• 3.141592

• 3.146559

• 3.141529

• circular constant

• Archimedes' constant

• Euler's number

• Ludolph's number

Which of these circles is the biggest?

• 
• 
• 
• 

In the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” this character foils the evil computer by commanding it to “compute to the last digit the value of pi.”

• Spock

• Captain Kirk

• Scotty

• Jar Jar Binks

Imagine you encircled the entirety of Earth's equator with a single piece of rope. Suppose you want to uniformly raise the rope above earth's surface by one inch. How much more rope would you need to accomplish this?

(The radius of Earth's equator is approximately 250,826,270 inches)

• Approximately 6 inches

• Approximately 3.14 kilometers

• 250,826,271 inches

• 787,993,967 inches

Which of the following ratios is constant (never-changing), regardless of a circle's size?

• area to radius

• circumference to area

• circumference to diameter