The legal values of pi
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: The legal values of pi
zbMATH Open document ID: 0557.01007
DOI: 10.1007/BF03024180
author: David Singmaster
published in: The Mathematical Intelligencer
publication date: 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
review text: 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.
reviewed by: A.Ghose
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A55
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 11-03
zbMATH DE Number: 3887630
zbMATH Keywords: infinitistic limiting process
zbMATH Keywords: transcendental number
MaRDI profile type: Publication
cites work: Indiana's Squared Circle
full work available at URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03024180
OpenAlex ID: W4255115204
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3887630