weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener) (03/23/86)
Followups to net.math only. In article <17600006@inmet> brianu@inmet.UUCP writes: >> (I confess to being inspired by >>a bill was once introduced into the, I think, Tennessee state legislature >>to get PI set to 3 so it would be easier to work with). > >Lies, lies, lies. I have heard this story about PI many times now. Finally >I ran across a book (the title of which I can't recall) which explained that >little bit of folklore. (This is from memory, so don't quote me) >It seems that faction A introduced a bill that faction B opposed (ain't it >always the way?) Faction A was strong in congress as a whole but faction B >was strong in the committee assigned to review the bill. So, faction B placed >a rider on the bill such that PI will henceforth have the value of 3. Faction >B figured that congress wouldn't dare pass it then. Wrong again. It passed. >So it had nothing to do with ease of usage or anything else like that. >Now doesn't that make more sense? I've never heard that version. As I try to follow these stories, I think it is apocryphal. Although a lot of stupid laws do get passed that way. I remember _The Mathematical Intelligencer_ running an article not too long ago with a discussion of the aborted Indiana attempt. One half of the legislature mindlessly passed the law that someone introduced to please his friend, whose geometrical description was so inept that no one could derive a value of pi from it. The other half failed to pass it, barely, but only because the newspapers heard about it and had a field day. Seems a free press IS needed to control our legislators. :-) He also mentioned an existing German law describing how to tax car engines that, if read literally, implied an erroneous method for finding the volume of a cylinder and hence for pi. Surprisingly, it gives a smaller tax this way. Perhaps that is why no one is clamoring to get the right value in. A weird book on pi with a long description of the Indiana fiasco is Petr Beckmann _A History of Pi_. ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720