Number 428 (Story #1), May 14, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein PI AND RANDOM NUMBERS. Pi is a "quark" of mathematics: it is one of the basic building blocks out of which various geometrical and algebraic relations are built. Normally thought of as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, pi keeps turning up in odd places. For example, Georges Leclerc, Count de Buffon, was the first to show a connection between pi and the occurrence of random events. In 1777 he performed an experiment in which needles are randomly dropped onto a surface covered with ruled lines spaced apart by an amount equal to the size of the needle; the fraction of times the needle comes down astride a line is related to pi. Mathematicians have exploited this relation to make random number generators. Sylvan Bloch (813-961-0778), of the University of South Florida does the converse of this. He and Robert Dressler developed software (for the classroom) for using random numbers to generate a statistical estimation of pi. By the way, in warped spacetime pi is not necessarily equal to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. As an appendix to his article in the April issue of the American Journal of Physics, Bloch shows how "pi" varies as space becomes increasingly curved. (As usual science journalists can obtain copies of articles from AIP public information. For pi lore, see http://forum.swarthmore.edu/dr.math/faq/faq.pi.html.)