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111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill 'introducing a new mathematical truth,' that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio 'five-fourths to four' or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a real mathematician intervened is quite interesting, because the man who discovered the 'new mathematical truth' wanted to charge royalties, which could have made pi the first form of irrational property."
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Does any idiotic thing get modded up as long as it blasts Christianity? Nowhere in the Bible does it talk about the principles of Euclidian geometry.
"And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about....And it was an hand breadth thick...." -- First Kings, chapter 7, verses 23 and 261 Kings 7:23 "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." or "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."
While the Bible doesn't actually state the nature of pi, and a cubit is an extremely rough unit anyway, it's amusing to note that if you properly define cubit as being a fixed length and assert that the word circular refers to a near-perfect circle, the units just don't work out unless you redefine space, and along with it, Pi. Putting the "fun" back in "fundies".
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Pi%20in%20the%20Bible
http://www.khouse.org/articles/1998/158/ There was an embedded code - a word that was written strangely: It gives an error of 0.00265%. Quite remarkable.
0x0D 0x0A
4 / 1.25 = 3.2
But if the Bible is the unerring Word of God, surely God wouldn't have said 10 cubits when he meant anywhere from 5 to 14.9 cubits, would he? :-P
Interestingly, however, if you pick a particular circle, the ratio actually has a 100% probability of being irrational, rather than rational. Informally, this is because the irrationals are so much 'denser' than the rationals (using the colloquial rather than the topological meaning of dense). A proper proof follows from the fact that the rationals have Lebesgue measure 0; i.e. they can all be enclosed in a set of intervals on the real line, the sum of the lengths of which can be made as small as you like.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
For a convex shape in the plane, the diameter is defined to be the largest distance that can be formed between two opposite parallel lines tangent to its boundary, and the width is defined to be the smallest such distance.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you write the division backwards, it's an obvious pattern: 113\355.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The Bible says that a well 10 cubits across will have a circumference of 30 cubits. An error of almost one and a half cubits is not "close".
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I found this quite interesting:
pi is close to sqrt(g), where g = gravitational acceleration on the surface of Earth in m/(s^2).
Apparently, this is not a coincidence.
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Hmmm... when I was young, I was taught that the diameter of a (bounded) set S in a metric space was the maximum (well, supremum) of the distances between any two elements in S. Seem a much simpler definition to me.(And wikipedia mentions this one, too)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I think you may mean Alabama instead of Missouri. And it didn't happen.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.