This past Monday I recieved a surprise piece of mail from India. Once I got over my initial shock of getting a piece of personal mail, an event that has not happened in a long time, I quickly found that this piece of mail contained other surprises as well. First of all it was addressed to a Dr. Samuel Hansen, a title that I will accept but have in no way earned. My next surprise came when I opened it an found that it was a letter claiming that the author, a R. Sarva Jagannadha Reddy, had discovered the exact value of pi. This seemed to me to be a rather surprising claim, but I was willing to go along with it until I flipped the page and found that the claimed exact value of pi was $latex frac{14-sqrt{2}}{4}$ which equals 3.1464466…..
I found it somewhat improbable that the best mathematical minds in history had made a mistake on the thousandths digit of one of the most important and used constants in the world. So of course I did some quick googling to see if I could find out any more information about RSJ Reddy and, too my complete lack of surprise, I found out that I was not the first person to recieve this letter(apparently he will eventually send you a whole book about he value of pi). The one thing that I did not find was a complete takedown of the work. I am currently very busy working on Relatively Prime, and while crank baiting is fun it is not as important, so I was hoping that I could enlist the help of ACMEScience community for this project. Under this post I will include photos of every page of the letter and I want everyone to look through the mathematics and figure out where it goes off the rails and explain the where and how in the comment section below. Once all of the errors have been identified I will collect them together in a blog post. Remember this is a public service, when the next person receives this letter and goes to google, we want to make sure there is a clear explanation of just why it is complete, and utter, bug splat on the windshield of mathematics.