During my career in aerospace and also as a pilot and flight instructor, I have been using the quantity PI (approximately equal to 3.14159265). As explained in the article excerpt below, PI is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Also in the article below is the notion that you can approximate the value of PI by throwing needles or frozen hot dogs.
From SpaceWeather.com
HAPPY PI DAY: March 14th (3.14) is PI day and all around the world mathematicians are celebrating this compelling and mysterious constant of Nature. PI appears in equations describing the orbits of planets, the colors of auroras, the structure of DNA. It’s everywhere.
Humans have been struggling to calculate PI for thousands of years. Divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter; the ratio is PI. Sounds simple, but the devil is in the digits. While the value of PI is finite (a smidgen more than 3), the decimal number is infinitely long:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795
02884197169399375105820974944592307
81640628620899862803482534211706…moreSupercomputers have succeeded in calculating PI to more than 200 billion digits and they’re still crunching. The weirdest way to compute PI: throw needles at a table or frozen hot dogs on the floor. Party time!
I wrote a universal triangle calculator using PI and other constants.
By the way, the needles and hot dogs will work – a group of us a long time ago in a lab at work performed the experiment using tongue depressors.