In 1777, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist and mathematician, posed a problem of finding the probability that a needle tossed on a ruled paper intersects a line (the length of the needle is supposed to be less than the distance between the lines). It turned out that this statistical experiment allows us to calculate approximately the number π.

It is interesting, that if instead of a segment we take an arbitrary curve and replace the probability of crossing by the expectation of the number of intersections, then the convergence to π is preserved and even becomes faster!