The legal values of pi (Q762132)

The paper describes an attempt by Goodwin to put forward another value of \(\pi\) as a better one than the usually accepted one, of how he tried to get this value accepted by legislation in 1897 in Indiana House of Representatives, U.S.A. Even recently there seems to be a quite bit of interest in Goodwin's assertions. Goodwin's main argument has been that the area of a circle is equal to the area of a square the side of which is 1/4 of the circumference of the circle. The ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle according to him is 5/4:4. The controversy about the value of \(\pi\) is historically interesting. The value of \(\pi\) which is accepted by mathematicians today is based on an infinitistic limiting process which is assumed to reach the value of \(\pi\) as a transcendental number for the ideal geometrical object: the circle. There can not be any empirical proof for this. Hence it is difficult to rule out other values of \(\pi\) as cranky (as the author of this paper does) as long as they are ''practically satisfactory'', unless we assume some sort of correspondence between the ideal world of mathematics and the empirical world.