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111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi

Posted by kdawson on from the squaring-the-circle dept.

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."

6 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Blashphemy ! by dkf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everybody knows that pi = 3. Only when your circles have six sides. (Hint: regular hexagons have a circumference/diameter ratio of exactly 3...)
    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  2. Re:Blashphemy ! by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Everybody knows that pi = 3. It's in the Bible, after all.

    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 26
  3. Re:Blashphemy ! by Andrew+Kismet · · Score: 4, Informative

    1 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

  4. Re:Blashphemy ! by mskfisher · · Score: 4, Informative
    It was better than close:
    http://www.khouse.org/articles/1998/158/

    The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number.
    There was an embedded code - a word that was written strangely:

    The common word for circumference is qav. Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (h).
    ...
    This indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/ 106, or 31.41509433962 cubits. Assuming that a cubit was 1.5 ft. this 15-foot-wide bowl would have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.
    This Hebrew "code" results in 47.12264150943 feet, or an error of less than 15 thousandths of an inch!
    It gives an error of 0.00265%. Quite remarkable.
    --
    0x0D 0x0A
  5. Re:Blashphemy ! by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Informative

    ummm, a hexagon does not have a diameter
    O RLY?
    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Re:Blashphemy ! by jafuser · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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