Scrooge McDuck, that great genius of anatine finance, is fond of diving into his vast piles of money. No doubt all of us would like to do likewise. So how much would it cost? Matt Powers, whose qualifications include being "good at making up fake math", crunched the numbers:
Looking at some of the best pictorial evidence of the McDuck vault, it is evident that this large pile of gold on the left appears to be five feet tall. This is deduced under the assumption that the average duck 14 inches tall, which is then used comparatively to quantify the pile (5 ft = 4.3 duck heights). With a little calculus and graph-work, the rough integral can pinpointed to y=-x2-1x+5. This equation puts every “x” and every “y” value at exactly one inch, as seen below.
When the area under the curve is calculated (from x=-3 to x=5), it yields roughly 46 square inches. The assumption will be made here that one cubic inch is roughly one ounce of gold. To convert that into a dome shape the value is simply cubed, which becomes 97,366 ounces. Given that 1 ounce of gold is roughly $5.00, it can extrapolated that each large pile of gold in the vault is worth $486,830.
Link -via Joe Carter | Image: Disney
Except that he seems to have completely missed the 90' depth sign.
Also, his vault goes very deep, much deeper than 5 ft.
I like the idea behind this 'fake' math experiment, just need more data from the show to make it authentic.
Proposed cost of 1 oz of gold: $5
Jim D's estimate: $1650
Multiplication factor of 330 (1650/5)
Proposed depth of the money bin: 5 ft
mE! observation: 90 ft per the drawing
Multiplication factor of 18 (90/5)
Revised estimate:
$486,830 * 330 * 18 = $2,891,770,200
Which would put Scrooge McDuck right behind Steven Spielberg and Donald Trump in the US (according to Forbes)