the allowable load. The restraint offered by the end connections of a column also affects its critical load. If the connections are perfectly rigid (not allowing rotation of its ends), the critical load will be four times that for a similar column where the ends are pinned (allowing rotation of its ends). Since the radius of gyration is defined as the square root of the ratio of the column's moment of inertia about an axis to its cross sectional area, the above Euler formula may be reformatted by substituting the radius of gyration for : where is the stress that causes buckling in the column, and is the slenderness ratio. Since structural columns are commonly of intermediate length, the Euler formula has little practical application for ordinary design. Issues that cause deviation from the pure Euler column behaviour include imperfections in geometry of the column in combination with plasticity/non-linear stress strain behaviour of the column's material. Consequently, a number of empirical column formulae have been developed that agree with test data, all of which embody the slenderness ratio. Due to the uncertainty in the behavior of columns, for design, appropriate safety factors are introduced into these formulae. One such formula is the Perry Robertson formula which estimates the critical buckling load based on an assumed small initial curvature, hence an eccentricity of the axial load. The Rankine Gordon formula, named for William John Macquorn Rankine and Perry Hugesworth Gordon (1899 – 1966), is also based on experimental results and suggests that a column will buckle at a load Fmax given by: where is the Euler maximum load and is the maximum compressive load. This formula typically produces a conservative estimate of . Self-buckling A free-standing, vertical column, with density , Young's modulus , and cross-sectional area , will buckle under its own weight if its height exceeds a certain critical value: where is the acceleration due to gravity, is the second moment of area of the beam cross section, and is the first zero of the Bessel function of the first kind of order −1/3, which is equal to 1.86635086... Plate buckling A plate is a 3-dimensional structure defined as having a width of comparable size to its length, with a thickness that is very small in comparison to its other two dimensions. Similar to columns, thin plates experience out-of-plane buckling deformations when subjected to critical loads; however, contrasted to