In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives voted 67 to 0 for a bill which, among several ways of squaring the circle that did not agree with each other, made pi come out as 3.2. Its author, a physician named Edwin Goodwin, offered the state the use of his discovery without paying royalties. In the House the bill went first to the committee on swamp lands. In the Senate it went to the committee on temperance, which recommended it. What stopped it was chance. A Purdue mathematics professor, Clarence Waldo, happened to be at the statehouse that week on other business, heard the bill being discussed, and explained to some senators what was wrong with it. Even then no one voted it down: the Senate postponed it indefinitely. So no senator is on record voting against a wrong value of pi. The record shows only a room that decided it would rather not be asked.