{"id":113,"date":"2008-09-25T19:00:32","date_gmt":"2008-09-25T18:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpethzprd.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/2008\/09\/25\/buffons-needle\/"},"modified":"2024-02-20T13:40:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T11:40:57","slug":"buffons-needle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/2008\/09\/25\/buffons-needle\/","title":{"rendered":"Buffon’s needle"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a result of recent moves, the (almost) complete set of Buffon’s monumental Histoire naturelle<\/a><\/em> belonging to my father’s family has recently arrived here in Z\u00fcrich (it comes from my grand-father, who was director of the Mus\u00e9um d’histoire naturelle de Nantes<\/a><\/em>). I will keep these in my office for the moment, as it definitely lends it a very scholarly air…<\/p>\n

(As far as I can see from the web page above, what is missing from our set is the Histoire naturelle des poissons<\/em>, which was not written by Buffon anyway, but by the Comte de Lac\u00e9p\u00e8de, who also wrote the volumes about snakes, which we do have).<\/p>\n

Many probabilists know Buffon<\/a> for his annoying habit of dropping needles on the parquet<\/em>, and finding the value of \u00a4\u00c7<\/em> after doing this sufficiently many times. This game was indeed included in his natural history, more precisely in the Essai d’arithm\u00e9tique morale<\/em> (or “Essay of moral arithmetic”) in Volume VII of the Suppl\u00e9ments<\/em> — at least, it is there in my family’s edition, though it is missing from the web site containing Buffon’s works, where the Essai<\/em> is in Supplement volume 4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here are pictures of the first pages of the description of the problem (click for readable larger picture):<\/p>\n

\"Buffon\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

\"Buffon\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

Notice the delightful typography and orthography: the “s” that looks like an integral sign (and is barely distinguishable from an “f”), the way the past tense is written demanderoit<\/em> instead of the current demanderait<\/em>, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a result of recent moves, the (almost) complete set of Buffon’s monumental Histoire naturelle belonging to my father’s family has recently arrived here in Z\u00fcrich (it comes from my grand-father, who was director of the Mus\u00e9um d’histoire naturelle de Nantes). I will keep these in my office for the moment, as it definitely lends … Continue reading Buffon’s needle<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-blogroll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethz.ch\/kowalski\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}