Calculating Pi with a Pendulum

Yesterday was Pi day and we are still celebrating! Simon experiments with calculating Pi with a physical thing, a pendulum. For the experiment, he cut a cord one fourth of the local gravity value (9.8m/s^2), that is 245 cm. One full swing of the cord makes Pi (measured in seconds)! Simon measures the time the pendulum makes 10 swings and divides that number by 10, to get the average duration of a swing.

The values Simon got were pretty close! The closest he got (not in this video, but later that day) was 3,128 sec., which is exactly the same value that Matt Parker got! What is the chance of that?

The formula is t = 2Pi times square root of l over g (where l is the length of the cord and g the local gravity).