From: Warrl kyree Tale'sedrin (warrl@blarg.net)
Date: Thu Jun 04 1998 - 00:03:24 MDT
From: John K Clark <johnkc@well.com>
> In 1897 the Indiana house of representatives unanimously passed a bill (#246)
> that would change the value of PI from 3.14159... to 16 divided by the cube
> root of 3 or 9.2376. The bill was defeated in the state senate by one vote,
> good thing too because not only is it wrong it's blasphemous, according to
> the Bible Pi is exactly equal to 3.
Are you sure about this? The most authoritative version I have heard (which I
acknowledge that I have not confirmed) is that the state was offered high-school
math textbooks at a steep discount, provided that they enact into law a certain
bill containing a bunch of mathematical language; analysis much later
determined that the bill would have made pi legally equal to some unlikely value
(5, I think);
but the rules committee of one house of the state legislature, finding the bill
hard to penetrate and being unsure of what they would find within it, referred it
to their Committee on Swamps. (Even legislatures do something intelligent
once in a while.)
And there it died.
US$500 fee for receipt of unsolicited commercial email. USC 47.5.II.227
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:10 MST