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From: "Robert J. Pease" <bobpease@pop3.concentric.net>
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: PI equals 3.00000000
Date: 13 Apr 1998 21:18:14 EDT
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User wrote:
>
> 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 pi, a mathematical constant
> used in the aerospace industry.  The bill to change the value of pi to
> exactly three 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
> pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense
> Organization.  According to Bergman, pi 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 pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by
> lawmakers.  Johanson explained that pi 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, pi 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 ten cubits across and thirty 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.  "Wee 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.  "Pi is
> merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry."   Humbleys is working on a
> theory which he says will prove that pi 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 pi 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, "its not exactly rocket science."
>
> Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to
> support the bill, agrees.  He said that pi 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 pi 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 pi is only a theory, and wee should be open to all
> interpretations."  She looks forward to students having the freedom to
> decide for themselves what value pi 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 pi.  A legislator in
> the state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have that state set
> the value of pi to three.  According to Dietz, the lawmaker was
> exasperated by the calculations of a mathematician who carried pi to
> four hundred 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 pi between traditional values supporters and the technical
> elite.  Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. "Wee just want to return
> pi to its traditional value," he said, "which, according to the Bible,
> is three."

It's time to force Alabama fundie nutcases to swallow their own
medicine.
Unless they are too cowardly to ENFORCE the new definition of pi,
all wheels must now be manufactured as hexagons.

for those of you wondering, yes the story is a hoax