111 Years Ago, Indiana Almost Legislated Pi 379
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "On February 5, 1897, 111 years ago today, the Indiana legislature very nearly passed a bill 'introducing a new mathematical truth,' that would have erroneously established pi as the ratio 'five-fourths to four' or 3.2. The story explaining the rationale behind the bill and how they were prevented from legislating it when a real mathematician intervened is quite interesting, because the man who discovered the 'new mathematical truth' wanted to charge royalties, which could have made pi the first form of irrational property."
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In Kansas... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
Does any idiotic thing get modded up as long as it blasts Christianity? Nowhere in the Bible does it talk about the principles of Euclidian geometry.
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
While the Bible doesn't actually state the nature of pi, and a cubit is an extremely rough unit anyway, it's amusing to note that if you properly define cubit as being a fixed length and assert that the word circular refers to a near-perfect circle, the units just don't work out unless you redefine space, and along with it, Pi. Putting the "fun" back in "fundies".
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Pi%20in%20the%20Bible [everything2.com]
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.khouse.org/articles/1998/158/ [khouse.org] There was an embedded code - a word that was written strangely: It gives an error of 0.00265%. Quite remarkable.
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:1, Informative)
While the Bible doesn't actually state the nature of pi, and a cubit is an extremely rough unit anyway, it's amusing to note that if you properly define cubit as being a fixed length and assert that the word circular refers to a near-perfect circle, the units just don't work out unless you redefine space, and along with it, Pi. Putting the "fun" back in "fundies".
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Pi%20in%20the%20Bible [everything2.com]
Re:whatcouldpossiblygowrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:2, Informative)
Those figures are obviously given to only one significant digit,
so the text merely implies that round(pi) = 3, which is perfectly true.
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:4, Informative)
But if the Bible is the unerring Word of God, surely God wouldn't have said 10 cubits when he meant anywhere from 5 to 14.9 cubits, would he? :-P
Ratios on a sphere and the density of irrationals (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, however, if you pick a particular circle, the ratio actually has a 100% probability of being irrational, rather than rational. Informally, this is because the irrationals are so much 'denser' than the rationals (using the colloquial rather than the topological meaning of dense). A proper proof follows from the fact that the rationals have Lebesgue measure 0; i.e. they can all be enclosed in a set of intervals on the real line, the sum of the lengths of which can be made as small as you like.
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:5, Informative)
pi is close to sqrt(g), where g = gravitational acceleration on the surface of Earth in m/(s^2).
Apparently, this is not a coincidence [reddit.com].
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm... when I was young, I was taught that the diameter of a (bounded) set S in a metric space was the maximum (well, supremum) of the distances between any two elements in S. Seem a much simpler definition to me.(And wikipedia mentions this one, too)
Re:Blashphemy ! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It wasn't all that long ago that.... (Score:4, Informative)