Indiana pi bill

The Indiana pi bill was bill 246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle. The bill implies incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.^[1] The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of C. A. Waldo, a professor at Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

The mathematical impossibility of squaring the circle using only straightedge and compass constructions, suspected since ancient times, had been proven 15 years previously, in 1882, by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those implied by the bill have been known since ancient times.