NP Alabama Pi

[rwan]

Re: NP Alabama PiI've actually contacted the Alabama State Legislature to
check whether any such bill was ever proposed and/or passed. The information
I received was emphatically negative, even though rumours of such being the
case have been popping up regularly during the last appr. 2 years.
Pi is - and remains - as yet undifined (beyond the 210 billion digits after
the decimal point). Amen.
Richard

----- Original Message -----
From: jporter
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2000 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: NP Alabama Pi





>From Vaska:




Can anyone confirm or otherwise that the deliciously/eerily bizarre Alabama
law proposal on pi ever got passed?  I found this posted from AGITPROP NEWS
(5.20.98) on the Roy Bhaskar list.


[snip, to the biblical justification]

"...Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot
be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact
answer could harm students' self-esteem.  "We need to return to some
absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the
font was thirty-something cubits.  Plain reading says thirty cubits.
Period."

Can't confirm or deny the veracity of the AGITPROP story, however,

between the Biblical literalists and Platonic Idealists (PI) there would
definitely seem to be a lost middle ground. Your post reminded me of a NY
Times article from Feb 10, 1998, that's been lying around on my bedroom
floor: *Useful Invention or AbsoluteTruth: What is Math?* by George Johnson.
At last, an excuse to pick it up.

I won't reproduce it here, but the gist: There seems to be growing support,
among those who think about such things, that Pi (and other versions of
Platonic Idealism) ain't so absolute, after all. Not that Math is a
"relativistic free-for-all," but it may very well be a human invention- a
manifestation not just of our brains but of our bodies, and the "grounding
metaphors" [George Lakoff- quoted in the art.] that link them.

Bottom line: Math works, but that doesn't mean it's the absolute truth, even
though many scientists (crypto-Platonists, no doubt!) appear to operate as
such.


cheers,
jody