Happy Percival Lowell's Pluto Day!

In article ,
Quadibloc wrote:
On Mar 13, 5:18=A0pm, kT wrote:

I'm beginning even to doubt the exact value of pi.

Ah, yes.

There were those who claimed that pi is

3.14159 26535 89793...

but that rule, according to others, fails to 'work both ways
mathematically', and thus one instead needs to recognize that "the
ratio of the chord and arc of ninety degrees is as seven to eight".

Thus, pi is actually equal to 32 divided by seven times the square
root of two, which would be

3.23248 81425 67074...

except that the commonly accepted value of the square root of two is
wrong too, as "the ratio of the diagonal and one side of a square" "is
as ten to seven".

Which makes pi equal to 3.2, as "the ratio of the diameter and the
circumference is as five-fourths to four".

Of course, if you put four squares next to each other to make a bigger
square, then their diagonals form a square too. And the side of that
square would be ten, while the diagonal would be fourteen; and
fourteen to ten is not quite the same as ten to seven. So, indeed, it
is the rule of Dr. Edwin Goodwin that fails to work both ways.

John Savard

Isn't pi exactly equal to 3 according to some old US law from the 1800's ???


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Paul Schlyter, Grev Turegatan 40, SE-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pausch at stjarnhimlen dot se
WWW: http://stjarnhimlen.se/

On Mar 14, 4:13*am, (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

Isn't pi exactly equal to 3 according to some old US law from the 1800's ???

I was quoting from the law that almost passed which started that
rumor. A circle-squarer decided he would get some publicity by having
the State of Illinois legislate in favor of his discovery, and he
figured the wy to do that was to offer them a way to save money by
doing so - in exchange for acknowledging his contribution to
mathematics, they would not have to pay royalties to include this new
geometrical truth in their school textbooks!

And this "truth" was that pi equalled 3 1/5.

John Savard

Isn't pi exactly equal to 3 according to some old US law from the 1800's ???
Paul Schlyter, Grev Turegatan 40, SE-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN


Sorry - that never actually happened. Urban Legend.

There WAS a bill in Indiana back in 1897 that passed in the State
House of Representatives but not the State Senate. (I can't tell if
even that one was serious - it's not that unusual for members of the
various legislatures to pass a bill in jest, knowing that it will
quietly die in the other house.)

That could have been what Robert Heinlein had in mind when he put in a
line about Tennessee actually passing such a law in his Science
Fiction book STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND in 1961. I guess some people
thought anything Heinlein threw into a story must be true, even when
writing about a futuristic society.

And then there was a joke article in 1998 about Alabama doing that,
published under the byline "April Holiday" on 4/1/98. People stripped
off the parts that made it clear it was an April Fool's Day joke and
circulated it as fact.

http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp