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The Legal Values of Pi

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Pi: A Source Book

Abstract

I have long been interested in the notorious attempt to legislate a legal value of π. I have read several artides [2,5,6,7/8,10] on the history of this attempt and it has been mentioned in the popular press recently [1,9]. From these it is clear that only Greenblatt [5] and Hallerberg [7] have tried to understand the obscure content of the proposed bill. Greenblatt found four different values of π given in it! Hallerberg has tried to understand how some of the values came about.

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References

  1. Anon. (1983) Reciting to the point of boredom. The Guardian (3 Nov.), 1

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  2. W. E. Edington (1935) House Bill No. 246, Indiana State Legislature, 1897. Proc. Indiana Acad. Sci., 45, 206–210

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  5. M. H. Greenblatt (1965) The “legal” value of p, and some related mathematical anomalies. American Scientist (Dec), 427A–434A

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  6. A. E. Hallerberg (1975) House Bill No. 246 revisited. Proc. Indiana Acad. Sci., 84, 374–399

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  7. A. E. Hallerberg (1977) Indiana’s squared circle. Math. Mag., 50, 136–140

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  8. T. F. Holgate (1935) Rules for making pi digestible. The Atlantic Monthly (July), 118–119

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  9. R. Millington (1982) Letter: The House divided and got a zero answer. The Guardian (8 Nov.)

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  10. C. A. Waldo (1916) What might have been. Proc. Indiana Acad. Sci., 26, 445–446

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnic of the South Bank, London, SE1 0AA, England

    David Singmaster

Authors
  1. David Singmaster
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© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Singmaster, D. (2004). The Legal Values of Pi. In: Pi: A Source Book. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4217-6_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-4217-6_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1915-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-4217-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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