How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs. A gargantuan calculation of pi in the 1850s ran up against the limits of manual arithmetic; figuring out where it went wrong calls for forensic mathematics. Download this Free Photo about Calculator on papers, and discover more than 3 Million Professional Stock Photos on Freepik Several good answers already, but only one of them gives you a way to compute π to any desired number of places -- Clement F, who gave an alternating odd harmonic series that converges, but does so ve-e-ery slowly, so that to get 5 or 10 places accuracy could take you a day or a year with only pencil & paper. Throwing a pie in someone's face is good. You need to know the formula for finding the area of a circle, A=\pi r^2. There are many special methods used to calculate π and here is one you can try yourself: it is called the Nilakantha series (after an Indian mathematician who lived in the years 1444–1544). Just type … Sure, you “know” it’s about 3.14159 because you read it in some book. It's called Buffon's needle problem. Yes. Seattle local news, traffic, weather, business news, sports, real estate, photos and events. Here is a famous one called Buffon's Needle. Pi is mysterious. This irrational number shows up in the craziest places. To conduct this experiment, all you need is a ruler, 10 frozen hot dogs, measuring tape, paper, and a pencil. I work in the metals industry, and this is how we calculate the length of a coil of metal, based on knowing its thickness, inner diameter and outer diameter. Calculating Pi Yourself. It's called Buffon's needle problem. There are many special methods used to calculate π and here is one you can try yourself: it is called the Nilakantha series (after an Indian mathematician who lived in the years 1444–1544). It pops up in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein’s general relativity, and the interaction between two electric charges. Pi Day is just around the corner (March 14, or 3.14), and we here at SciFri came across a fun simulator that estimates the number in a blog post by Tommy Ogden, a Ph.D student in theoretical physics at Durham University in England.. How to Calculate the Area of a Circle. In Buffon's Needle experiment you can drop a needle on a lined sheet of paper. Unlike metal, toilet paper is often "quilted", which makes its thickness hard to measure. Pencil, Paper, and Pi By Brian Hayes. In Buffon's Needle experiment you can drop a needle on a lined sheet of paper. — just your brain and a piece of paper. If you swing a mass back and forth on string, there’s a pi in there. You can solve these problems as long as you know the circle's radius and can do some simple multiplication. It asks for the probability that the needle will cross a line. However, the website www.wikihow.com serves up an entirely different—and tastier—approach to calculating pi that everyone’s inner child will enjoy: throwing frozen hot dogs.