State: Indiana · Statute: None — House Bill 246 (1897), passed the House, never enacted · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
Every "dumb laws" list eventually gets here: Indiana, we are told, once tried to make pi equal to 3 by law, usually because of religion, or to make school easier. Almost every part of that sentence is wrong. The real episode — fully documented in the legislative record — is stranger, funnier, and needs no embellishment.
Edward J. Goodwin was a country physician in Indiana and an amateur mathematician with an obsession: squaring the circle, the ancient problem of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle using only compass and straightedge. The catch is that the problem had already been settled — Ferdinand von Lindemann proved it impossible in 1882, fifteen years before Goodwin went to the legislature. Goodwin was undeterred. In 1894 his "solution" appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly, in an unrefereed section, under a disclaimer that it was published at the author's request.
Goodwin's business plan deserves respect for sheer nerve. He offered his "new mathematical truth" to Indiana free of charge for use in its schools — provided the state adopted it by law. Everywhere else, he intended to collect royalties. The state legislature was, in effect, his marketing department.
House Bill 246, introduced by Representative Taylor I. Record, carried the gloriously unselfconscious title "A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education." The word "pi" appears nowhere in it. The bill's real subject was Goodwin's circle-squaring method, but working through his geometry produces wreckage: in Section 2, a model circle with diameter 10 is assigned a circumference of 32, and the bill states that "the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four" — which works out to π = 3.2. The same passage implies √2 = 10/7. Mathematician David Singmaster later counted seven different values of pi implied in Goodwin's work. The bill could not agree with itself, let alone with geometry.
The House barely knew what to do with the thing. A member proposed sending it to the Finance Committee; the Speaker instead accepted a recommendation to send it to the Committee on Canals — also known as the Committee on Swamp Lands — where, as one account puts it, it could "find a deserved grave." It was rescued and transferred to the Committee on Education, which reported favorably. On February 6, 1897, the bill passed the Indiana House without a single dissenting vote.
Salvation arrived by accident. Clarence Abiathar Waldo, a Purdue University mathematics professor and president of the Indiana Academy of Science, happened to be at the statehouse to secure the Academy's annual appropriation. An assemblyman offered to introduce him to the genius behind the bill. Waldo declined, remarking — by his own later account — that he was already acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know. Then he quietly went and briefed the senators.
It worked. The Senate took up the bill on February 12, 1897, and according to the Indianapolis News, spent about half an hour making fun of it — bad puns, ridicule, laughter. Senator Hubbell moved to postpone the bill indefinitely, pointing out that newspapers in Chicago and the East were already mocking Indiana, and another senator observed that the General Assembly lacked the power to define mathematical truth. The motion carried. The bill was never enacted. It was never even formally defeated on its merits; it was laughed into a drawer, where it remains.
There is no Indiana pi law. There never was. There is a real bill, a real unanimous House vote, and a real near-miss that ended only because one professor happened to be in the building. The popular version gets the number wrong (3.2, not 3), gets the motive wrong (royalties, not religion), and promotes a dead bill into a statute. The Bureau files this as FOLKLORE WITH REAL ROOTS — and notes, with some admiration, that these particular roots are among the best-documented in American legislative history.
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