Skip to footer

Pi Day: five fun facts about 3.14

March 14, or 3.14, is Pi Day. Get it? Pi Day celebrates all things related to the mathematical constant that measures the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Here are five things you should know about π. 

4. Not even legal action could determine its value

In perhaps one of the most famous attempts to establish scientific truth through the government, the Indiana Legislature tried legally to establish the most accurate value of pi in 1897 with the Indiana Pi Bill.

It was proposed by Rep. Taylor I. Record, who introduced it under the long title, “A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897.”

Despite its name, the main focus of the bill was to find a method to square the circle (the impossible task of constructing a square within the same area of a given circle), rather than to establish an actual value for pi, though the bill did dictate values for π, now known to be incorrect.

The bill never became law, due to the intervention of a mathematics professor who happened to be present in the Legislature. 

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.