111 years ago today:
1897: Egged on by an amateur mathematician, the Indiana General Assembly almost passes a bill adopting 3.2 as the exact value of pi (or π). Only the intervention of a Purdue University mathematician who happens to be visiting the legislature prevents the bill from becoming law, saving the most acute political embarrassment.
What became known as the Indiana pi bill was sponsored by Rep. T.I. Record at the behest of Edwin J. Goodwin, a physician and math dilettante who claimed to have figured out how to square circles.
House Bill 246, proposed as "an act introducing a new mathematical truth," went through three reads before being passed unanimously by the House, presumably to avoid having to endure a fourth.
Although it comes down to us as the "pi bill," pi itself is never mentioned in Record's bill, which was, in fact, intended to confirm Goodwin's formula for squaring the circle. The value 3.2 for pi was a prerequisite for making that formula plausible.