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It is the 120th anniversary of the passing of a bill by the House of Congress of Indiana to change the value of pi to 3.2! [Errors in the original are copied here verbatim. -Ed]
Weird as it sounds, in effect the House voted 67-0 on H.B. 246 "Introducing a new mathematical truth" on February 5th, 1897 and referred to the Senate of Indiana.
On February 2, 1897 Representative S. E. Nicholson, of Howard County, chairman of the Committee on Education, reported to the House:
"Your Committee on Education, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, entitled a bill for an act entitled an act introducing a new mathematical truth, has had same under consideration, and begs leave to report the same back to the House with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
The bill was duly passed to the Senate on February 10th and read on the 11th, then referred to the Temperance Committee. On February 12 Senator Harry S. New, of Marion County, Chairman of the Committee on Temperance made the following report to the Senate:
"Your Committee on Temperance, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, introduced by Mr. Record, has had the same under consideration. and begs leave to report the same back to the Senate with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
On the afternoon of February 12 "Senator Bozeman called up House Bill No. 246. The bill was read a second time by title. Senator Hogate moved to amend the bill by striking out the enacting clause. The motion was lost. Senator Hubbell moved to postpone the further consideration of this bill indefinitely. Which motion prevailed."
The bill was never voted on, it was simply postponed following ridicule from the press. "Senator Hubbell characterized the bill as utter folly. The Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law. Leading papers all over the country, he said, were ridiculing the Indiana Legislature. It was outrageous that the State of Indiana should pay $250 a day to have time wasted on such frivolous matters."
A very interesting story by Will E. Edington then at DePauw University, published by the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Sorry PDF only.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:57PM
Lets see if I get this. Some 120 years ago Dr. Goodwin (medical doctor, not mathematician) claims to have come up with a "solution" for squaring a circle but only if we make PI equal to 3.2? If the Indiana legislature would just agree with him and redefine PI to said number he would let them use his copyrighted method for free.
Sure it was a pre-computer age and it might have been tempting to cut down on the required amount of calculations - calculating with squares is somewhat easier then circles if you do it by hand. One is left wondering that if this was accepted what would have been broken - everything else that does depending on PI actually being the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter and not 3.2.
Also wasn't politicians back them a bit more educated in the classics such as Euclids Elements and his axiomatic theories then they are today -- they seem to mostly be made up of smiling idiots and lawyers these days. No wonder they laughed.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:19PM
I can't imagine that much would have been "broken". Indiana has never been a really huge industrial state; it's mostly agriculture.
As for politicians being educated more back then, I do believe you may be right about that. In fact, it seems like most people back then (at least those with an education, which back in those days would have been a subset of society) had a far better education than "educated" people today do.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:07PM
"Better"? Many probably received a "classical education", largely comprising studying latin and ancient greek.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:20PM
That historically came with a side dish of geometry... Back in the day they learned more geometry than our kids now, which makes the whole situation even more troll-ish.
I'm pretty sure the whole situation happened because of some early morse code version of 4chan, obviously /hc/ and /s/ were not as much fun over morse code so 1800s /b/ got way the hell out of control and managed to get a state legislature to believe them. I'm about 95% sure it was the same personalities and motivations a century ago, human nature doesn't change that much.
Sent in morse code by a bunch of anons "Say old chap I can't get a trollop for fornicational purposes at the saloon so let us troll the state legislature in our state of non-marital activities" "Sir OP I daresay you are correct on this fine day, I shall send 5000000 telegrams to the legislature, I live in my mom's barn basement so I cannot take an iron horse to the proceeding yet my telegrams will oil lamp (gaslight) them into thinking its widely supported" thats... thats ... about as much steampunk as I can handle in one sitting, now to wash my fingers out with soap...
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:54PM
My late father received a classical education, and geometry did not feature in it.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:08PM
Education is like religion in that there's a lot of fight between sects over "we gonna do what they do but without astronomy" or "we gonna copy them with the addition of architecture".
quadrivium lists geometry by name, so if he's more than 2000 or so years old I'm thinking there's merely a misunderstanding .... Although I suppose there are a lot of things running under the rather generic name of "classical education".
I bet some "great books" curricula tend away from geometry which is probably hard to learn from a book for most people. So there's that whole blur where classical and great books are both gonna read Plutarch but there ARE differences.
What is really classical education and what the law makers learned as kids in 1800 might have nothing to do with each other, of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @10:30PM
Made me chuckle.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @03:01AM
That kind of place sounds nice. Living in Chicago the Indiana I always saw were the derelict factories, tailing ponds & steelworks of US Steel. Sort of like a more hideous and depressing version of New Jersey.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:50PM
Not to mention, you can't even round pi to 3.2 in a way that makes sense in the first place. 3.14159 rounded to the closest tenth is 3.1.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:11PM
Yeah, but 3.2 is even. When in doubt, always round to even numbers: in the long run you'll be rounding up and down about the same amount (since there are approximately as many even as odd numbers - we could of course also chose to always round to odd, but even numbers have better divisibility so even it is.) so that eventually evens out. 3.2 obviously is the best value for pi: otherwise we would have to round up all the way to 4, which would be ridiculous.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday February 14 2017, @06:22PM
Yeah, but 3.2 is even. When in doubt, always round to some completely arbitrary technobabble
Clear as mud, thanks. I was rather surprised one time when I was writing something using Visual Studio and apparently their math library's rounding methods are "towards zero" or "away from zero." Hmmm.
Plus the reasoning is allegedly to make circling the square work, so they might as well use perpetual motion to justify the change in the first place :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:18PM
If the Indiana legislature would just agree with him and redefine PI to said number he would let them use his copyrighted method for free.
I just posted a longer comment about this, but I don't think he was actually trying to redefine Pi, since his published paper on the subject actually uses various values for Pi (sometimes 3.2, sometimes 4). What he was actually trying to accomplish was simply squaring the circle, effectively using approximations.
Also wasn't politicians back them a bit more educated in the classics such as Euclids Elements and his axiomatic theories then they are today -- they seem to mostly be made up of smiling idiots and lawyers these days. No wonder they laughed.
I suspect in this case it was their "classical education" that allowed this bill to get so far. They would have likely all been familiar with the "squaring the circle" problem that had been unsolved since antiquity. But they probably didn't know much more about it other than what their geometry teacher told them in school, i.e., it was a classic unsolved problem. Now you have this guy who shows up and says, "I published a solution to this in a mathematical journal." If he had comes straight out and said, "I think Pi is 3.2 and sometimes 4," I doubt his bill would have gotten far. Instead, he played off the fact that he could solve a previously unsolved issue that some of them may have heard of.
As to whether they actually knew anything about it, the linked PDF says no:
Although the bill was not acted on favorably no one who spoke against it intimated that there was anything wrong with the theories it advances. All of the senators who spoke on the bill admitted that they were ignorant of the merits of the proposition. It was simply regarded as not being a subject for legislation.
Sounds like mostly they were amused that their House colleagues had been hoodwinked, and even though they didn't know any better (except that a math prof had told them it was BS), they had a good laugh about the fact they were being asked to legislate on mathematical proofs in the first place.