# I How can I derive pi?

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1. Jun 3, 2016

### Jatin Kaushal

I was wondering, how can I derive pi without fancy math (fancy meaning too complex. I'm not taking out calculus or trig or anything, just not too advance concepts). Can anyone help me out?

2. Jun 3, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Derive what?
You first need a definition of pi. Everything else (what exactly do you want? Its numerical value?) has to start from there.

3. Jun 3, 2016

### ProfuselyQuarky

You mean pi in relation to a circle or the digits of pi?

4. Jun 3, 2016

### Jatin Kaushal

Pi as in how can I find out the actual digits of pi if I never know it. Like how can I find out the ratio of the circle's Circumference to it's diameter

5. Jun 3, 2016

### ProfuselyQuarky

That requires computation on software....Maple can do about 10,000 digits instantly.

Last edited: Jun 3, 2016
6. Jun 3, 2016

7. Jun 6, 2016

For fun:

8. Jun 7, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Take a tiled floor and scatter a handful of nails or satay sticks, mix with lots of patience, and you can experimentally determine a value for Pi by a procedure known as Buffon's Needle experiment. http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~hfinkeln/seminarium/stelling_van_Buffon.pdf

Don't expect many places of accuracy at first, but to improve on this, rinse and repeat many times.

And did I mention that you'll need lots of patience?

Last edited by a moderator: Apr 18, 2017
9. Jun 7, 2016

### 256bits

Lovely. Used to Play Pick Up Sticks. Never would have guessed Pi was involved.

10. Jun 7, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Another demonstration uses what is known as a Monte Carlo technique. Draw a square of some convenient size, and inside the square draw the largest possible circle.

Next, scatter lots of dots at random all over the square; keep a count and call this number S dots. Count how many of those random dots fall inside the circle, call this number C. Then the ratio C/S gives us the ratio of the areas of the two figures, viz., Pi/4.

The more dots you scatter, the more accurate the resultant estimate for Pi. Repeat this multiple times to improve the result even further.

I like this method, because after performing it 7 or 8 times you can apply a law of statistics to produce an estimate of Pi to much better precision than you would expect.

11. Jun 7, 2016

### DrewD

I do this with my students for a fun activity every year. With enough drops you can easily get three of four decimals correct. What is your trick for improving precision?

12. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

To expect to get 3.14 correct (<1/100 error on 4-pi), you need about 10,000 points. 3.141 or 3.142? 1 million. A computer can easily do that, but it doesn't sound like fun to do it manually.

13. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Which provides an incentive to improve the procedure by reducing the labor involved! You don't need the full common central area, so you can eliminate the circle's inscribed square from the picture. And you don't need 4 areas, all identical---just one will do. This leaves us with a 3-sided figure containing a circle segment: the competing areas to be covered with dots now being roughly equal.

I'm not sure how to prove it mathematically, but I have a notion that when there is not a big difference in the two competing areas then Monte Carlo gives us better accuracy with fewer random dots. I think I decided that by taking the ratio C/S for this modified figure, and doubling it, we have the fractional portion of Pi, i.e., our estimate to ⋅14159

14. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

I can help, because we have a binomial distribution with variance $N p q$ whereas the central value is Np or Nq. You gain much more from removing areas, however - going to a triangle makes the final formula $\pi = 2 + 2 \frac{inside}{total}$, so the relative uncertainty now applies to a smaller value (~1.14 instead of 3.14). You could now start to cut away a triangle from the outer part as well, going to $\pi = 2 + 1.3 \frac{inside}{total}$ and so on. Effectively you are approximating pi with the areas itself then, the closer you get with one of the areas the better.

15. Jun 8, 2016

### DrewD

I should correct my earlier comment: I meant that I often have accurate answers. I usually only do this experiment in classes that are not advanced enough to understand variance and estimating errors. Most of the time we have gotten decently good values with about 200-500 points per class.

16. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

17. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Even with 500 points, getting 3.14 is more luck than a good estimate. 3.1 or 3.2 should be very frequent, but still not guaranteed.

18. Jun 8, 2016

### down to earth

Question; wouldn't it be possible to derive the number pi just by knowing that it should be equal to a circle's circumference divided by its diameter? If you could use a ruler or something to get a reasonably accurate measurement of the circumference of an existing circle with a known diameter or radius, couldn't you divide that number by the diameter and get a value for pi to within a decimal or two (or more, depending on how accurate your circumference measurement was)? Maybe you could do this with several different circles and average the pi values, for your estimate to be more accurate?

19. Jun 8, 2016

### DrewD

Yes, it was luck. I didn't mean to encourage people to guarantee good values with only a few hundred points.

20. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

Sure, you can use a ruler. Other methods are just more accurate.

21. Jun 8, 2016

### Staff: Mentor

During the French Revolution the revolutionaries declared that the value of Pi was to have a value of exactly 3 to simplify calculations so mathematics would no longer be the preserve of the hated intellectual elite.

I'm not sure how long this edict remained in place until it was quietly rescinded.

22. Jun 8, 2016

### mathwonk

23. Jun 10, 2018