To the editors:
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You might want to include this even earlier chapter in the saga: According to Alexander Thom, the late Scottish engineer-turned-archaeoastronomer, the neolithic peoples of western Europe also had an interest in regulating pi. Thom surveyed hundreds of sites in the British Isles and France and claimed that, for many sites, he was able to determine the geometrical layout of rough standing stones to an accuracy of 1 in 1,000. Aside from all the astronomical alignments and whatnot, he also claimed to have found a consistent pattern, in which many stone “circles” were purposefully distorted in such a way that the ratio between their diameter and circumference was equal to three. In essence they were rounding (or rather, “flattening”) the value of pi. Other, less empirically inclined authors have proposed reasons for why they might have done this: three is a sacred number; small integers are sacred numbers, and so on. Thom himself merely believed that they laid out the ellipsoids with triangles using their own specific “Megalithic Yard”-stick.
Neal Duncan
