William Jones, a self-taught Welsh mathematics teacher, introduced pi in his 1706 Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, arguing the ratio could never be expressed in numbers and so needed a pure symbol. Euler's adoption made it universal. The ratio itself is ancient: Babylonian and Egyptian approximations, Archimedes' bounds. And the Indiana episode is documented to the vote count: Goodwin's bill to enshrine 3.2 passed the House unanimously in 1897 and died in the Senate after Professor Waldo of Purdue intervened.
The story skeptics love: 1 Kings 7:23 describes Solomon's molten sea, ten cubits across and thirty around, implying pi equals 3. Rabbis and apologists have countered for centuries: the rim had thickness, the measurement ran inside or outside, and one gematria reading finds a correction factor, 111 divided by 106, hiding in the spelled versus read forms of the word for line, bringing the text to 3.1415. The ancient text, in this telling, encoded the correction in its own spelling.
The claim, since John Taylor's 1859 The Great Pyramid: the monument's perimeter-to-height ratio encodes pi with an accuracy its builders supposedly lacked, so either the Egyptians possessed advanced mathematics the record hides, or someone else taught them. The rebuttal is structural: any construction built with a rolling drum or wheel for measurement inherits pi automatically, whether the builders ever computed it or not. The circle was in the tool, not the theory.
A Welsh teacher invented the symbol, a state nearly outlawed the truth, and a pyramid theorist found it in stone. How many times can one ratio be discovered?