[2266] in Humor
HUMOR: pi or idiot lawmakers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael A Behr)
Tue Apr 14 17:38:32 1998
To: humor@MIT.EDU, humor@fdemocracy.org
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 17:30:23 EDT
From: Michael A Behr <mabehr@MIT.EDU>
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From: Monica Lee Taylor <monicat@MIT.EDU>
>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."
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