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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."
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
thats because pi to 4 decimals is 666/212 so therefore anything close real pi is of course the devils work. (I can't believe I just stumbled on something more accurate than 22/7 by accident while trying to make a real lame joke)
... a bill was introduced in Missouri (I think) which would have set the *official* value of pi to 3. It seems somebody decided it would be easier for children to learn how to use it. Well, that's Missouri for you !
3 is "close enough" if you are working with primitive hand tools and haven't the need or resources for monumental architecture and engineering.
Apparently, the bill's main purpose wasn't to establish a value of Pi, but to provide a method to square the circle. Doubly retarded! Also, why do we need LEGISLATION of squaring the circle? What political significance does this hold, other than the fact that politicians can't math?
If you want a good approximation to pi then try 355/113. (remember it as 113355)
wot no sig
You just know it doesn't make sense.
Bitter and proud of it.
My personal favorite: 2^9/9^2 almost equals 2*pi.
Unfortunately the Egyptians had calculated it as 4 * (8/9)**2 in about 1650BC (Rhind Papyrus), this comes to about 3.16. Archimedes (287-212 BC) estimated it to lie between 223/71 and 22/7. The Chinese and Indians had also got reasonable estimates at about the same period.
Just goes to show you can't believe everything put forward by a set of bronze/iron age goat herders.
There's also "precedent" for the OT's use of significant digits or rounding. Though the upper bound of human lifespan is stated at 120 years (either a Really Good Guess as to what would apply over the next few thousand years, and several billion future people, by a nomad who probably knew a couple hundred people personally--or divinely inspired, depending on your predisposition), and we have evidence that (at last check of Guinness) a couple recent people lived to 122.
So, 31.415926535 as 30, 122.x as 120 would be methodologically consistent.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
However, they make it clear that the typical spelling was not used, which was the clue:So it's not like they force-fit it in place - it's more that a clue was left:It's not definitive proof - we'd have to go back and ask the original authors - but it's a lot less shaky than doing some kind of wacky algebra like your "stadia" example used.
0x0D 0x0A
My favorite part of the bill is the final line, which reads:
And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as insolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend.
This, along with the rest of the math in the bill, makes it clear that the authors were the sort that only "believe" in rational numbers. Of course, by that time mathematicians already had a pretty good hold on the rest of the real numbers, and there wasn't any mystery at all about the existence of numbers that weren't the ration of two integers. The only real mystery here is why they preferred the approximation 3.2 rather than 3.1. Not that either is good enough for engineers, who routinely used 3 places as the minimal precision if you don't want to be laughed out of the room.
One of my favorite bits of mathematical humor is the many cases where they have taken criticisms and turned them into terminology. Thus, when it was realized that numbers like e and pi couldn't be written as ratios of integers, there were a lot of dummies who didn't accept this, and attacked the rationality of the people who did. The response of mathematicians was to say, in essence, "Hey, they call us irrational; that's a good word. Let's call the numbers that our critics believe in as 'rational', and the numbers that they don't believe in as 'irrational'. They'll be happy, and we'll have handy words for talking about these two kinds of numbers."
It happened again when people started talking about square roots of negative numbers (and engineers found practical uses for them in the real world). There were the usual criticisms, to the effect that negative numbers don't have square roots, and it's stupid to talk about things that don't exist. The natural (;-) reaction of the mathematicians was to first be bemused by the very idea that any kind of numbers have any sort of real existence. Then they adopted the critics' words as terminology, with 'real' numbers the sort that the critics accepted, and 'imaginary' numbers the kind that produced negative numbers when multiplied by themselves. That must have really played with the critics' minds. "Oh, you want to talk about real numbers; that's room 12A, just along the corridor. We're talking about imaginary numbers here. Stupid git."
Of course, there's the even more basic concept of 'natural' numbers, i.e., positive integers. It's clear from most most languages' words for numbers that most people historically have only dealt with this sort of number. Even today, many US high-school kids have a certain resistance to the idea that they have to learn about fractions, which strike them as 'unnatural' and pointless. So mathematicians adopted 'natural' as a subtle jab at the irrational attitude of the ignorant masses.
At least this bill's authors had enough understanding to accept rational numbers as real, though they classified irrational numbers like pi as "insolvable mysteries". It is sad (and funny) that as late as 1897 this sort of ignorance could actually make an appearance in a legislative body and apparently be taken as anything but a lame joke.
There have been other bills like this in the past, though as far as I've read, none of them has ever actually been passed, or even voted on. Anyone know of a case where one reached a vote?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"Round" doesn't (necessarily) mean the same as "circular". Anybody up on the original Hebrew? (As if it matters).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
round adj 1 shaped like, or approximately like, a circle or ball. 2 not angular, with a curved outline (Chambers 21st Century Dictionary)
So, according to definition 2, an ellipse is round, for example. And depending on the eccenticity, the ratio of circumference to diameter (major axis) of an ellipse can be anywhere between 2 and pi: 3, maybe?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?