From JOHN FAUVEL
In his query about American states legislating for the value of pi (Letters,
26 October), Peter Burrows half-remembers a fascinating but muddled story.
In 1897 the State of Indiana nearly passed into law the claims of a circle-squarer
named Edwin J. Goodman that he had found a ‘new and correct value’ for pi.
Unfortunately, the bill is so obscurely worded that it contains some
ten different and contradictory values for pi. And unfortunately for lovers
of civic humour, the vote on the second reading of the bill was postponed
so it never became law.
An account of this may be found in Peter Beckmann’s lively A History
of pi (New York, 1971).
In supposing that the value of pi concerned was exactly 3, Peter Burrows
may be confusing the Indiana representatives with the Institute for Pi Research
of Kansas, also discussed in your columns (New Scientist, 6 August 1984).
These scholars claimed not only that pi is 3, but that since this is the
biblical version of pi (I Kings vii; II Chronicles iv, 2) their views deserved
equal time in state schools. ‘We deserve to be taken as seriously as creationists,’
they say.
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The Kansas institute provides a challenging example of a group seeking
to test how far the views of biblical fundamentalists can be sustained.
John Fauvel The Open University Milton Keynes
