Indiana Pi Bill
The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for 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, although it does imply various incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by a physician who was an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of Prof. C. A. Waldo of 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 compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, had been rigorously 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. (Wikipedia).
