If one amateur mathematician had his way, we might not be celebrating Pi Day on March 14th.
Way back in 1897, Edward Goodwin almost convinced the Indiana state legislature to pass the [Indiana Pi Bill](https://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/localgov/second%20level%20pages/indiana_pi_bill.htm), which would have legally defined the value of π as 3.2.
As Curiosity.com editor and podcast host Ashley Hamer tells it, Goodwin thought that he had solved a long standing mathematical problem.
“[Mathematicians] were trying to come up with a square that had the same area as a circle, but because you have Pi in the formula for the area of a circle, you can’t actually do that,” she said. “It would mean that one of the sides would have an irrational number.”
Convinced he had the answer, Goodwin helped introduce legislation that eventually passed the Indiana House with a 67-0 vote. But the bill was stopped when it got to the State Senate.
“The Senate realized that you can’t actually make laws defining mathematical truths,” Hamer told Cheddar. “It’d be sort of like making a law saying the Earth is flat. There’s no real reason to even make that law, because that’s not really their responsibility.”
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/everything-youll-ever-need-to-know-about-pi-2).
For the first time in 60 years of human spaceflight, a rocket is poised to blast into orbit with no professional astronauts on board, only four tourists.
Solar energy has the potential to supply up to 40% of the nation’s electricity within 15 years — a 10-fold increase over current solar output, but one that would require massive changes in U.S. policy and billions of dollars in federal investment to modernize the nation's electric grid, a new federal report says.
The company overseeing the response to a large oil spill spurred by Hurricane Ida said Tuesday that a containment dome has been placed over a broken undersea pipeline, stemming the flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
Gain-of-Function, Mexico Abortion Stunner & Album Wars
Cheddar asked its Gen Z and Millennial-aged Facebook and Instagram users about several topics including how they use social media, buying cryptocurrency, and the future job market.
The speed limit for most of Paris is now 30 kilometers per hour (less than 19 miles per hour). The new rule takes effect Monday almost everywhere in the city except for a few wide avenues like the Champs-Elysees and the bypass circling the capital.
Brazil, the country with the most freshwater resources in the world, has lost 15% of its surface water over the last three decades.
A SpaceX shipment of ants, avocados, and a human-sized robotic arm is on its way to the International Space Station.
A fearsome Hurricane Ida has left scores of coastal Louisiana residents trapped by floodwaters and pleading to be rescued, while making a shambles of the electrical grid across a wide swath of the state in the sweltering, late-summer heat.
New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell has ordered people outside the city’s levee protection system to evacuate. Forecasters say Ida made landfall in Cuba as a hurricane and could grow to an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm with top winds of 140 mph when it nears the U.S. coast.
