Astrophysicist John Quincy Stewart once compared the search for the perfect map projection to trying to round Pi. It sounds absurd, but someone actually did try to round Pi in the past. And when I say round, I mean completely ruin its value. After listening to an amateur mathematician, the Indiana state legislature was about to change Pi with a law in 1897, and that madness was only stopped when it reached the Senate…
The relationship between a circle's circumference and its diameter. The formal description of Pi is compelling, but that hasn't stopped us from turning the number into something more. Pi can be a memory exercise with formal competitions and records, a stress test for computers, a special day that includes celebrations around the globe, or why not, an emergency number on the Buenos Aires subway.
However, history shows that calculating Pi or using it in different contexts has never been enough. On more than one occasion, we have tried to change its value. Some interpreted it as 3.2, and others as 4… but there is a special case that stands out drastically from the rest. Why? Because the original plan was to round Pi with a law.
Rounding Pi... with a law
Everything happened between 1888 and early 1897. An amateur mathematician, identified as Edward Goodwin, believed he had discovered the definitive solution to the problem of squaring the circle… which had already been declared impossible to solve in 1882. Depending on how you interpret the original text, the reader can come to the conclusion that Pi had for Goodwin a value of 4, although he took care to emphasize on more than one occasion that it was 3.2.
Regardless of the error, the point is that he managed to convince Indiana representative Taylor I. Record that his new “fundamental truth” of mathematics be turned into law, with a small asterisk: the schools and other educational institutions of Indiana could use it for free, while the rest would pay royalties.
Goodwin's work reached the Indiana House of Representatives, which then referred it to the Committee on Swamps... and to the Committee on Education... only to be approved with a resounding 67 to 0.
Fortunately, Goodwin's horror came to nothing thanks to the intervention of Clarence Abiathar Waldo, a mathematician and professor at Purdue University who was in the area during the preliminary approval. After hearing such horror and refusing to meet Goodwin, Waldo decided to prepare and warn the Indiana Senate.
The newspapers had already learned of the whole case, the first jokes became public, and when the law reached the chamber, the senators had a feast with half an hour of mathematical jokes strung one after another, before discarding it completely. If you want to know more about Pi, don't hesitate to watch Numberphile's trilogy (enable Spanish subtitles), and its own history.
