March 14 is World Pi Day. To write it like in the US, it’s 3.14 (month.date) — the value of pi to two decimal places. All the reason we need a quiz on numbers.

1 Which iconic jazz piece was inspired by a group of Turkish musicians performing a traditional folk song in 9/8 time, a rare meter for Western music?

2 Which PO Box number is the mailing address of every Australian Broadcasting Corporation office in the state capitals of Australia?

3 Who or what is listed as the 13th greatest villain in film history in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest heroes and villains? Remember, this is a quiz on numbers.

4 Which iconic book originally had the number 18 in its title, which was changed to another number at the last minute because Leon Uris’s Mila 18 had just been published?

5 8208 is a number that has four digits, each of which if raised to the power 4 and added will end up giving the original number. Because of this self-referential ‘loving’ quality, by what name are such numbers known?

6 Which Hindi film revolves around a hero figuring out the significance of ‘NO 17’?

7 Which character in an iconic television series claims to have memorised the value of pi to 40,000 places, noting that the 40,001st digit is 1?

8 The “paperback line theory” claims that this is the average number of lines on a page of a paperback book. Then there is the “Lewis Carroll theory” that claims the author is celebrating Carroll’s use of the number in Alice in Wonderland . These are both theories explaining a well-known number in popular literature. Which is it?

9 The cicadas of the genus Magicicada are often mistaken for locusts. What is unique about their birth cycle, the subject of many scientific studies?

10 On April 15 every year, which number will you see on the back of every player in a Major League Baseball game in America?

Answers

1. Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’, which abandoned the traditional 4/4 time of jazz and used a 5/4 time. It remains the bestselling jazz single of all times

2. 9994, as a tribute to Sir Donald Bradman’s test batting average of 99.94

3. HAL 9000, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey

4.Catch 22 , which was originally supposed to be ‘Catch 18’

5. Narcissistic numbers

6.Kallicharan . Spoiler alert. It turns out that it’s actually LION, the nickname of the villain upside down. Deep, very deep!

7. Apu, in The Simpsons . Simon Singh wrote a whole book about the math in the Simpsons and Futurama .

8. 42 as the answer to Life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series

9. They appear every 13 or 17 years. Apparently, returning in prime number years increases their chance of survival and they are the only living creatures following a prime number cycle

10. 42, to commemorate the day Jackie Robinson became the first Afro-American to play Major League baseball. It was his jersey number

( Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup )

Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj

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