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Challenge Team Interim Report

Team Number: 083 School Name: Plaza Learing Center Area of Science: Mathmatics Project Title: Quasi Buffon's Needle

Quasi Buffon's Needle experiment calculates pi by throwing needles onto a ruled surface. Buffon's Needle was first thought up in 1777 by the French naturalist and mathematician, the Comte de Buffon. Buffon's Needle is one of the oldest problems that deals with geometrical probability, and the results are amazing. Think of a plane, that is ruled with equally distant parallel lines, where the length between the parallel lines is X. A needle of a length less then X is dropped onto the ruled surface. What is the probability that the needle dropped, crosses one or more of the parallel lines. The answer is this, if you take the ratio of the number of times it does cross to the number of needles dropped you get a number similar to that of PI.

Recently we have been learning a lot about C++ and organizing information to help structure our project. We started coding bits and pieces of our final presentation such as random number generators and we hope to pull all of the different sections together soon. Also we have learned a significant amount on HTML and UNIX and how to use the mode and pi machines to help us along with our project.

Team Members

Team Mail

• Timothy A. Combs
• Amelia S. Hindmarch
• Jennifer V. Knouse
• Michael C. Pagliara
• Tyler N. Thurston

Sponsoring Teachers

• Roger E. Frye
• Martie LaCasse

Project Advisor(s)

• Roger D. Jones