in Indianapolis, which viewed the event with less favor than its English-speaking competitors. As this debate concluded, Purdue University professor C. A. Waldo arrived in Indianapolis to secure the annual appropriation for the Indiana Academy of Science. An assemblyman handed him the bill, offering to introduce him to the genius who wrote it. He declined, saying that he already met as many crazy people as he cared to. When it reached the Indiana Senate, the bill was not treated as kindly, for Waldo had talked to the senators previously. The Committee on Temperance to which it had been assigned had reported it favorably, but the Senate on February 12, 1897 postponed the bill indefinitely. It had been nearly passed, but opinion changed when one senator observed that the General Assembly lacked the power to define mathematical truth. Influencing some of the senators was a report that major newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune, had begun to ridicule the situation. According to the Indianapolis News article of February 13, 1897, page 11, column 3: ... the bill was brought up and made fun of. The Senators made bad puns about it, ridiculed it and laughed over it. The fun lasted half an hour. Senator Hubbell said that it was not meet for the Senate, which was costing the State $250 a day, to waste its time in such frivolity. He said that in reading the leading newspapers of Chicago and the East, he found that the Indiana State Legislature had laid itself open to ridicule by the action already taken on the bill. He thought consideration of such a proposition was not dignified or worthy of the Senate. He moved the indefinite postponement of the bill, and the motion carried. Mathematics Approximation of Although the bill has become known as the "Pi Bill", its text does not mention the name "pi" at all. Goodwin appears to have thought of the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle as distinctly secondary to his main aim of squaring the circle. Towards the end of Section 2, the following passage appears: This comes close to an explicit claim that , and that . This quotation is often read as three mutually incompatible assertions. However, they fit together well if the statement about is taken to be about the inscribed square (with the circle's diameter as diagonal) rather than the square on the