Legislating Pi

Yesterday was the one hundred and eleventh anniversary of the Indiana legislature's unknowing attempt to set the value of pi. The story, told here, is amusing. A physician in Solitude, Indiana (that should have been a warning itself) was an amateur mathematician who thought he had devised how to square the circle. For those who aren't aware of this pastime, the idea was, using compass and ruler, to construct a square that had the same area as a given circle.

Although the possibility of doing this in a finite number of steps was disproved in the early 1880s when pi was shown to be a transcendental number (not the root of a polynomial with function with rational coordinates), Dr. Edwin Goodwin had apparently not heard. He wrote a bill encapsulating his idea and persuaded his local representative to introduce it.

The quasi-mathematical ramblings must have worn on the unfortunate elected officials, who, largely not understanding a word read out loud, were ready to pass it, with the byproduct of effectively setting the value of pi to 3.2 and also of legislating a royalty, to be paid the ingenious fellow, on the use of the new value. Luckily the universe did not need to adjust its functioning because an actual mathematician, the chair of Purdue's math department, happened to be in the chamber at the time, and he took the time to explain the problem.