Balloons. Pigs. Trigonometry. Read On.

Low Moor Farm, a pig farm in North Yorkshire, England, had sued hot air balloon company Go Ballooning for causing the stampeding deaths of numerous pigs. Back in April 2012, one of the company’s sightseeing zeppelins flew low over the farm. The firing burners went over like a lead balloon among the farm’s porcine pack, who broke through a fence and fled 200 yards into a ditch. The bloodbath was profound: in the initial chaos, three pigs died of heart attacks, and 140 sows miscarried as many as 800 piglets. Another boar died of injuries the next day.

So them’s the facts. But proving the balloon had indeed caused the stampede came down to a farmer’s wife, a golfer’s tool, and yes, a mathematician.

At issue was determining the actual height of the balloon when it passed over the farm (law prevents hot air balloons from flying lower than 1,500 feet). Weapon #1: The wife of a nearby farmer had coincidentally taken a photo of the balloon that day, offering the first piece of photographic evidence. Weapon #2: a laser rangefinder owned by Low Moor farmer Mick Gilbank, which he used to determine the exact height of the trees.

But the ace in the hole was trigonometry, that sine wave scourge of your sophomore year. Chris Fewster, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of York, testified that the balloon had floated as close as 300 meters, or less than 1000 feet, from the pigs. How’d he do that? The actual formula makes our head hurt (we’re writers, not math geeks), but in layman’s terms he used the length of the balloon, the focal length of the of the camera, and the height of the trees to calculate the tilt of the camera and thus the distance of the balloon. Blinded by the science, Go Ballooning ended up paying out a settlement of 40,000 pounds.

“This case shows how even relatively simple mathematics like trigonometry can make an important contribution,” Fewster later told the Telegraph. (Simple maybe to you, bud.)

Even observing legal minds were surprised to learn that trig has actual real world applications (Mr. Ware was right!).

“It’s the first time in 20-odd years of practice that I’ve had to use a maths expert,” the prosecuting lawyer told the Daily Mail.

So kids: skip gym instead.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.