How Pi was nearly changed to 3.2 - Numberphile

have you ever heard of the time when they tried to redefine Pi when it was to redefine Pi so that it was 3.2 I'm I'm about to yes you are this is absolutely insane it's a true story as well and it's absolutely crazy so this happened well I don't think that long ago it was 1897 and there was a guy called Edwin Goodwin this amateur mathematician who thought he had solved one of the unsolved problems of mathematics and a problem that goes way back to ancient Greece it was called squaring the circle the problem is uh can you find a square that has the same area as a circle so this problem goes way way back and it's a favorite problem for amateur mathematicians and this guy thought he had solved the problem but implicitly in his proof he had assumed that Pi was exactly 3.2 now he was so pleased with this proof he he wanted to copyright the proof itself so that anyone using the proof from that point on would have to paying royalties but he decided that the great state of Indiana which is where he's where he was from that the educational establishments of Indiana could use it for free how kind of him and so what he did was he had a bill made up uh and he tried to pass it into law that would recognize the mathematical truth that he had discovered but it would allow Indiana to use it for free so I think he had a friend someone he knew who was part of the House of Representatives in Indiana and they made up this bill saying that the great mathematical truth of square in the circle now this bill went through committes uh went through the education Committee in the House of Representatives and they obviously didn't know what they were doing cuz they passed the bill and the the representatives uh actually passed it unanimously 67 to0 they passed it now this is the weird bit on the same day that they were passing the bill there was a mathematician in the building he was there for a completely different reason right he was a guy called Professor Waldo but he decided to sit in on what they were discussing because it was about math he was interested and he couldn't believe what he was hearing uh they invited him to meet Edwin Goodwin oh do you want to meet Edwin we're very proud of him he said no I meet enough crazy people as it is thank you very much so this mathematical Professor uh then decided to coach the Senate the next thing that happens is the bill goes from the House of Representatives to the Senate so this professor coached the sen Senators so that they knew what they were doing by this time the newspapers had heard of it they were mocking what was going on so when it reached the Senate uh they threw it out right they threw it out not before having a bit of fun with it they had about half an hour of math puns and making jokes about it then they threw it out but seriously there are there are solutions to square solutions to square in the circle where you take really good approximations to Pi uh more serious mathematicians for example ramuan who was an Indian mathematician and a brilliant one at that he had a solution to this as well so ramuan came up with an approximation uh which meant that he if you made a circle with an area of 140,000 square miles then you could have a square with the same area and the sides of the square would be off just by an inch so Edwin Goodwin had done this in 1897 and the you can see the documents it's absolutely true this story you can you can look at the documents yourself you can read it uh and it's a strange thing to happen as well because the problem he was trying to solve squaring the circle was proved to be impossible 15 years earlier in 1882 so I think we should have a video about squaring the Circle and what it means should we do that we do that we'll film that okay we're about to film it now Tune In Tune in soon and we'll show you about squaring the circle let's have a look at what you can do with rules and Compasses you can add numbers look here's a line and it has length a then I add another line of length B and the whole thing is a + b