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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)
If you want a good approximation to pi then try 355/113. (remember it as 113355)
wot no sig
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.
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.