Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana:

It has been found that a circular area is to the square on a line equal to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square on one side. (Indiana State Legislature, 1897, House Bill No. 246, Section I.)

...implying PI=4. The man pulling the leg of the 67 honourable members adopting unanimously this Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth was the physician and amateur-mathematician Dr. Edwin Goodwin. Note his admirable paraphrasing of 1 as the ratio of the area of an equilateral rectangle to the square on one side.

In Section II. several alledged instances of the present, entirely wrong rule are given, implying resp. PI=10/3, PI=16/5 and PI=16/7*square root of 2.

In Section III. the author offers as a gift to the State of Indiana the free use of his solutions of the trisection of the angle, duplication of the cube and quadrature of the circle, having already been accepted by American Mathematical Monthly.

The bill was introduced in the House not on April 1, but on January 18, 1897.