Oh, Amber — if we had a nickel for every time someone asked this question, we’d be … well, we’d be five cents richer. But first things first: persnickety geometry teachers will remind you that Camp Randall isn’t a circle, and so it doesn’t have a circumference. It’s an ellipse and has a perimeter. While it’s true that, in common usage, both terms show up equally often for ellipses, we at Flamingle HQ respect nothing so much as persnicketiness, so we’ll go with perimeter. As you’ll remember from Math 221 (one of the UW’s most popular courses), an ellipse is the simplest of the Lissajous curves, so you can easily calculate its perimeter using Srinivasa Ramanujan’s approximation. (As we all have that formula memorized, there’s no need to take up space with it here.) All you need to know are the ellipse’s semimajor and semiminor axes — the distance from the center to the farthest edge and to the nearest edge, respectively. At the level of Barry Alvarez Field, Camp Randall’s semimajor and -minor axes measure approximately 255 feet and 110 feet, meaning that the perimeter is about 1,192 feet and five inches. Add in all the grandstands and seats, and the ellipse grows. Its semimajor and -minor axes are then 395 feet and 285 feet, making its perimeter about 2,150 feet, three inches. As for that nickel you didn’t offer us, it is a circle, with a diameter of .835 inches, making its circumference 2.62 inches.

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