This model circle almost led to a major political and mathematical embarrassment for the Indiana legislature. *

Image: Henning Makholm * 1897: Egged on by an amateur mathematician, the Indiana General Assembly almost passes a bill adopting 3.2 as the exact value of pi (or π). Only the intervention of a Purdue University mathematician who happens to be visiting the legislature prevents the bill from becoming law, saving the most acute political embarrassment.

What became known as the Indiana pi bill was sponsored by Rep. T.I. Record at the behest of Edwin J. Goodwin, a physician and math dilettante who claimed to have figured out how to square circles.

House Bill 246, proposed as "an act introducing a new mathematical truth," went through three reads before being passed unanimously by the House, presumably to avoid having to endure a fourth.

Although it comes down to us as the "pi bill," pi itself is never mentioned in Record's bill, which was, in fact, intended to confirm Goodwin's formula for squaring the circle. The value 3.2 for pi was a prerequisite for making that formula plausible.

House 246 was sent on to the state Senate and was on the verge of passage when everyone's bacon was serendipitously saved by C.A. Waldo, a Purdue mathematics professor who happened to be in the Statehouse on another matter. Shown the bill and offered an introduction to the genius whose theory it was, Waldo declined, saying he already knew enough crazy people.

Waldo stuck around long enough to educate the senators, and the bill eventually went away.

Incidentally, pi is an irrational number – its value can be worked out in infinitesimal detail, never ending and never repeating – but calculated down to 50 decimal places it is 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510. Squaring the circle remains a mathematical impossibility.

(Source: Various)

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