05-09-2005, 12:05 PM
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#17 (permalink)
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Easy Rider
Location: Moscow on the Ohio
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by aKula
Slightly off topic, but my mother (who is a Mathematician), once told me that a US state had a law in place saying that 22/7 will be considered as Pi exactly. Though I'm not sure about the truth of this story, the proposed law above has certain similarity to this story.
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You have to wonder what these guys were thinking, or should that be drinking. 
Quote:
http://www.acc.umu.se/~olletg/pi/indiana.html
The estimate pi=3 is charitable. They were much farther off.
On January 15, 1897 Edwin J. Goodman of Solitude, Indiana introduced bill #246 to the Indiana House of Representatives that not only legislated \pi =16/sqrt(3) > 9, but also squared the circle and trisected an arbitrary angle. The bill said in part
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana: It has been found that the circular area is to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square on one side. The diameter employed as the linear unit according to the present rule in computing the circle's area is entirely wrong...
The bill was passed back to the general assembly by the Committee of Education with the recommendation that it be passed. It was passed on February 5, 1897 with a vote of 67 to 0.
"An ex-teacher from the eastern part of the state was saying: 'The
case is perfectly simple. If we pass this bill which establishes a
new and correct value for pi , the author offers to our state
without cost the use of his discovery and its free publication in
our school text books, while everyone else must pay him a royalty.'"
Then, it went to the Indiana Senate. By accident, a mathematics professor from Purdue, C. A. Waldo, happened to be attending the debates on the day the bill was read to the Senate. He managed to educate some of the senators in a hurry, and the bill was tabled. It has been on the table ever since, as far as I've heard.
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