Math and April Fool's Day.

Over the years, people have experienced a variety of April Fool's jokes, some of which have a mathematical twist or flavor to them.    If nothing else, they are fun.

In 1980, The BBC managed to convince the public that Big Ben would be converted from its analogue form to have new digital faces.  People protested only to find out it was a hoax.  The BBC is known as pulling some good stunts over time such as "harvesting spaghetti" or "smell-o-vision" which allows the television watcher to smell whatever is shown on their screens.

Two years later in 1982, The BBC ran a story of a once in a life time event in which Pluto would end up behind Jupiter, creating a unique cancellation of Earth's gravity so if people leapt into the air at exactly 9:47 AM, they'd experience a weightless sensation.  The BBC received calls from people who claimed they'd floated including a group who stated, they'd floated up to the ceiling.

Capital Radio in 1979, claimed the government would have to implement "Operation Parallax" to allow time to resynchronize itself.  Apparently, the United Kingdom had gained a total of 48 hours due to the country flipping onto and off daylight saving's time.  To catch up, the country had to cancel April 5th and April 12th to get the United Kingdom back in line.  People fell for it.

In 1975, an Australian news show announced the conversion to metric time.  They had a metric clock with a 10 hour clock face to show the world.  The new metric clock had a conversion rate of 100 secs = 1 min, 100 min = 1 hour and 20 hours = 1 day. The Australians were quite upset with this.

Another prank happened when it was announced that the state of Alabama decided to round pi to 3.0 which is what the Bible states.  The "news" made the rounds and upset a ton of people before they found out it was a prank.

Of course there was the one where a mathematician sent out an e-mail on April 1, 1997, claiming a solution had been found a proof for the Riemann-Hypothesis.  It excited so many mathematicians but they were disappointed when they discovered it was nothing more than a prank.

As you can see, even math cam't escape having April Fool's pranks played on it in some way.  Have a great day.