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).
The government plays a key role in determining the colors of your food, and for that, we can thank the margarine wars of the late 19th century.
A designer named Robert Propst dreamed up what he called “The Action Office” as a groovy 1960s workplace utopia. This is how it all went so wrong.
The huge parachute used by NASA's Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message.
KoBold Metals announced a partnership with Stanford University to improve mineral mining efficiency while also receiving investments from major players in the climate space such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures overseen by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
An analysis by U.S. regulators says Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine protects against COVID-19.
The COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. has topped 500,000, all but matching the number of Americans killed in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
A bone cancer survivor who's now a physician assistant will join a billionaire on SpaceX's first private spaceflight this fall.
Southern U.S. cities slammed by winter storms that left millions without power for days have traded one crisis for another.
President Joe Biden toured a state-of-the-art coronavirus vaccine plant Friday as extreme winter weather across broad swaths of the U.S. handed his vaccination campaign its first major setback.
A NASA rover has landed on Mars in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on the red planet.
