Close, but no pie
25 Feb 2005 
in the late evening 
Matt Winckler
Last night at Bible study a story surfaced that some city in Kansas had at one time passed legislation declaring that pi was equal to 3 instead of 3.141529 etc. The illustration was that it didn’t matter what they claimed it was; the fact remained that pi equals 3.14 etc. The story about the legislation had the hallmarks of UL, so today I decided to find out if it was actually true. One of the first search results I got was, conveniently, the Straight Dope. They say that while most of the embellishments on the story are false (no law was ever actually passed), there remains a grain of truth at the center of the story. It seems that the Indiana state legislature made a run at redefining pi, but not to 3–rather, to one of 3.2, 3.23, 3.4, or several other possibilities. (The ambiguity was one reason the law was never passed.) The bill, after being referred to the Committee on Temperance (?!), passed its first reading but was tabled indefinitely before reaching a second reading after a real mathematician pointed out how utterly stupid the idea was.
So now you know.