Math and Stats Graduate Student Seminar

This week, Geoffery McGregor will be telling us about collisions to Pi:

 The number Pi is defined by the quotient of a circular object's circumference and it's diameter. Over the centuries many experiments have been developed in order to approximate this quotient. In this talk, we discuss one such experiment. With only two billiard balls and a wall, and the assumption that momentum and kinetic energy are conserved, we prove that one can generate the digits of Pi by counting the number of collisions between these three objects along a straight line. To obtain more digits of accuracy we simply alter the weight of the second ball. Although this isn't the most practical way to compute Pi, it is certainly one of the most surprising.