Pi Day

Students at Berlin Bilingual School took mathematics out of textbooks and into their own hands this week by performing Buffon's Needle experiment to estimate Pi.

Through teamwork, careful measurements and plenty of needle drops, our students from classes 7, 8, and 9 learned first-hand how probability connects with geometry!

What is Buffon's Needle Experiment?

Named after French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, this classic experiment uses probability and geometry to estimate the value of Pi. Students dropped needles onto a surface marked with parallel lines spaced evenly apart, recording each time a needle crossed a line.

This experiment works because the probability of a needle crossing a line directly relates to Pi; specifically, this probability depends on the needle length, the distance between the lines, and Pi itself.

The students' estimated value of Pi was 3.30803, which is impressively close to the actual Pi value of approximately 3.14159.

Achieving even greater accuracy would require dropping thousands of needles, demonstrating the importance of large sample sizes in statistical experiments.