Indiana pi bill
The bill implies incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
[1] The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of C. A. Waldo, a professor at Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.
The mathematical impossibility of squaring the circle using only straightedge and compass constructions, suspected since ancient times, had been proven 15 years previously, in 1882, by Ferdinand von Lindemann.
Record, who introduced it in the House under the title "A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897".
The text of the bill consists of a series of mathematical claims, followed by a recitation of Goodwin's previous accomplishments: ... his solutions of the trisection of the angle, doubling the cube and quadrature of the circle having been already accepted as contributions to science by the American Mathematical Monthly ... And be it remembered that these noted problems had been long since given up by scientific bodies as unsolvable mysteries and above man's ability to comprehend.
[6] The news of the bill caused an alarmed response from Der Tägliche Telegraph, a German-language newspaper in Indianapolis, which viewed the event with less favor than its English-speaking competitors.
[8] As this debate concluded, Purdue University professor C. A. Waldo arrived in Indianapolis to secure the annual appropriation for the Indiana Academy of Science.
The Committee on Temperance to which it had been assigned had reported it favorably, but the Senate on February 12, 1897, postponed the bill indefinitely.
It had been nearly passed, but opinion changed when one senator observed that the General Assembly lacked the power to define mathematical truth.
[10] Influencing some of the senators was a report that major newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune, were ridiculing the situation.
He said that in reading the leading newspapers of Chicago and the East, he found that the Indiana State Legislature had laid itself open to ridicule by the action already taken on the bill.
times the true area of the circle, which, in many accounts of the pi bill, is interpreted as a claim that
Edward J. Goodwin (1895) "(A) The trisection of an angle; (B) Duplication of the cube," American Mathematical Monthly, 2: 337.
