Happy Pi Day!!! by Geezer

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Happy Pi Day!!!

POSTED BY: GEEZER
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 22:31
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Wednesday, March 14, 2012 2:50 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Everyone find the area of that circle!

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012 3:50 AM

FIVVER

Punchline to old redneck joke: Pie are round. Cornbread are square.

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:22 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Not if ya bakes it in da skillet it ain't!

-F

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012 10:31 PM

OONJERAH

Bill seeks to change value of π

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the
Alabama state legistature narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining π (pi), a mathematical constant used in
the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of π to exactly 3 was introduced without fanfare by Leonard
Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon
Society, a traditional values group. Governor Guy Hunt says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise. “It would have been nice if they had consulted with
someone who actually uses π,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
According to Bergman, π is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that π is a universal constant, and cannot
arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that π is an irrational number, which means that it has
an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, π
is precisly defined by mathematics to be “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate”.

“I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it,” said Lawson.
“The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the alter font of Solomon’s Temple was 10 cubits across and 30
cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass.”

Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that
never knowing the exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem. “We need to return to some absolutes in our
society,” he said, “the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty
cubits. Period.”

Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center
who testified in support of the bill before the legislature in Mongtomery on Monday. “π is merely an artifact of
Euclidean geometry.” Humbleys is working on a theory which he says will prove that π is determined by the geometry
of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be “isotropic”, or the same in all directions.

“There are other geometries, and π is different in every one of them,” says Humbleys. Scientists have arbitrarily
assumed that space is Euclidean, he says. He points out that a circle drawn on a spherical surface has a different
value for the ratio of circumfence to diameter. “Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler, and globe can see for
themselves,” suggests Humbleys, “it’s not exactly rocket science.”

Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to support the bill, agrees. He said that π is nothing
more than an assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to argue against the bill. “These nabobs
waltzed into the capital with an arrogance that was breathtaking,” Learned said. “Their prefatorial deficit resulted
in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to the legislature’s puissance.”

Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way math is taught to Alabama’s children. One
member of the state school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of π into the state’s math textbooks,
but thinks that the old value should be retained as an alternative. She said, “As far as I am concerned, the value
of π is only a theory, and we should be open to all interpretations.” She looks forward to students having the
freedom to decide for themselves what value π should have.

Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has followed the controversy, wrote that this is not
the first time a state legislature has attempted to redifine the value of π. A legislator in the state of Indiana un-
successfully attempted to have that state set the value of pi to 3. According to Dietz, the lawmaker was exasperated
by the calculations of a mathematician who carried π to 400 decimal places and still could not achieve a rational
number. Many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of a national battle over π between traditional
values supporters and the technical elite. Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. “We just want to return π to its
traditional value,” he said, “which, according to the Bible, is three.”

As a final note, while the ALabama legislature never attempted to legislate the value of pi, the state of Indiana did.
In 1897, House Bill No. 246 tried to legislate, among other things, the value of pi to be 3.2 exactly. While it passed
in the House, the Senate agreed to postpone it indefinitely after being “coached” by a Purdue mathematician.
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An April Fool's story from 1998

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