Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

pi in your eye



This just in! Film at eleven.

X-arrival-time: 895335296
From: <jimm@cats.ucsc.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 09:14:54 -0700
To: ccrummer@cats.ucsc.edu, chieko@cats.ucsc.edu, CNikiC@aol.com,
fyrmedic@got.net, harm@bendnet.com, howe@hydrogen.ucsc.edu,
quad@earthlink.net, spggdh@cats.ucsc.edu, words@cats.ucsc.edu
Subject: pi in your eye

For your amusement:

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city
are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature 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 Fob James 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 precisely 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 Montgomery 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 circumference 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 redefine 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."





Charlie Crummer
Lower Division Physics Lab. Mgr.
University of California
Santa Cruz 95064
(408)459-4154