[2265] in Humor
FW: incredible, but true (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mikhail Khusid)
Tue Apr 14 15:38:54 1998
From: "Mikhail Khusid" <Mikhail_Khusid@notes.teradyne.com>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 15:30:48 -0400
From: "sglator@ctilab.com" <sglator@ctilab.com>
Subject: FW: incredible, but true (fwd)
-----Original Message-----
From: Vyacheslav Lukin [SMTP:lukin@cs.swarthmore.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 1998 1:29 PM
Subject: FW: incredible, but true (fwd)
>> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
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. "We 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 we 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. "We just want to return pi to its traditional
value," he said, "which, according to the Bible, is three."
