Here's one for you all that gave me a shiver and a laugh.
--
-((Insert standard disclaimer here))-|----- Arthur Wellesley --------------
John Kenneth Dickinson | Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)
Grad. Student Mech. Eng. U.W.O. | "There is no mistake;
now: dickijk@bille.ppc.engga.uwo.ca | there has been no mistake;
| and there shall be no mistake."
---------- Forwarded 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."
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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