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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."

3 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 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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