3 ms·

When someone says 90 degree angle, does that confuse you?

jerf 11y ago
As it happens, I've tutored people in the middle of high school geometry. Radians confuse them. Full stop. If there is something that can make it easier to understand, while at the same time sacrificing absolutely nothing of mathematical consequence, it's a good thing. What confuses me is not the relevant issue. I've got $BOATLOADS of higher ed. I'm not the interesting case.
- jeffwass 11y ago
  Ok, we're far away from my original point which was only on using tau in one website. My actual only personal argument against Tao as Hartl proposed it is the use of a standard Greek letter. Really would have preferred he picked something that was more "backwards compatible", exactly as physicists did with hbar. If you're for reducing confusion, do you think adding a new fundamental constant to the body of mathematics that is a Greek letter already used for countless other variables in history, will this cause confusion between old and new mathematical science texts and papers? Asking students of science for any texts and papers they read whether tau is 2pi or some other variable, and keeping track across them, seems more confusing to me than just consistently using pi and extra factors of 2.
  - hugs 11y ago
    You have a valid complaint about reusing a letter that already had meaning in other contexts. He does address that in the manifesto, though.
hugs 11y ago
"90 degrees" is not confusing to me in the same way that measurements in feet and miles is not confusing. I was raised in a system that emphasized degrees, feet, and miles (USA). But in engineering, metric is the standard/default system of measurement. And in software libraries (e.g. JavaScript's Math built-in lib) or many calculators, the default is radians, not degrees. So even though degrees is more natural for me, it was worthwhile to get a deeper understanding of radians. The Tau Manifesto got me there. (90 degrees is 1/4 turn around a circle, which happens to be expressed as 1/4*tau -- and I didn't even have to look that up!)

jerf 11y ago

As it happens, I've tutored people in the middle of high school geometry. Radians confuse them. Full stop. If there is something that can make it easier to understand, while at the same time sacrificing absolutely nothing of mathematical consequence, it's a good thing. What confuses me is not the relevant issue. I've got $BOATLOADS of higher ed. I'm not the interesting case.

jeffwass 11y ago
Ok, we're far away from my original point which was only on using tau in one website. My actual only personal argument against Tao as Hartl proposed it is the use of a standard Greek letter. Really would have preferred he picked something that was more "backwards compatible", exactly as physicists did with hbar. If you're for reducing confusion, do you think adding a new fundamental constant to the body of mathematics that is a Greek letter already used for countless other variables in history, will this cause confusion between old and new mathematical science texts and papers? Asking students of science for any texts and papers they read whether tau is 2pi or some other variable, and keeping track across them, seems more confusing to me than just consistently using pi and extra factors of 2.
- hugs 11y ago
  You have a valid complaint about reusing a letter that already had meaning in other contexts. He does address that in the manifesto, though.

hugs 11y ago

"90 degrees" is not confusing to me in the same way that measurements in feet and miles is not confusing. I was raised in a system that emphasized degrees, feet, and miles (USA). But in engineering, metric is the standard/default system of measurement. And in software libraries (e.g. JavaScript's Math built-in lib) or many calculators, the default is radians, not degrees. So even though degrees is more natural for me, it was worthwhile to get a deeper understanding of radians. The Tau Manifesto got me there. (90 degrees is 1/4 turn around a circle, which happens to be expressed as 1/4*tau -- and I didn't even have to look that up!)