Talk:Indiana Pi Bill

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Confusing article

Can someone who understands math, take a stab at making this article more clear? I tried, but doubted myself and ended up not saving my revisions. GodotGrow a vagina 18:21, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

The basics are pretty simple: Crank "discovers" the "true" value of pi, crank attempts to pass his pet theory into law, crank gets pwned by a real mathematician. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 18:26, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

When i read teh wikipedia article, it wasn't really about 'pi" but "squaring the circle". GodotGrow a vagina 18:29, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

The two amount to basically the same thing. Squaring the circle means constructing a square with the same area as a given circle. If the circle has radius 1, its area is pi, so to square it, you have to draw a square whose sides have length the square root of pi. So, when you claim to square the circle, you are claiming that some line you have drawn has length the square root of pi. This guy's particular way of squaring the circle actually gave a square whose side was the square root of 3.2, so his claim that it squared the circle is tantamount to claiming pi = 3.2.

The intro could be changed to stress the squaring the circle angle more, if that would be more clear. I guess it's usually called the pi bill because claiming pi=3.2 is more obviously ridiculous than claiming to square the circle. But actually both are wrong, so either way... --18:41, 25 January 2012 (UTC)