3 ms·
The thing is, torque is a particularly bad thing to conflict with. While you're not using torque every time you work with pi, you usually end up using pi every
by amalcon 16y ago
The thing is, torque is a particularly bad thing to conflict with. While you're not using torque every time you work with pi, you usually end up using pi every time you work with torque.
edit: It's much like using i for both sqrt(-1) and for current. Electrical engineers need to use both of these all the time, so they often use j for sqrt(-1) instead.
- krschultz 16y agoOr you could use M for moment and stop using tau for torque. Most mechanical engineers talk about moments with M instead of tau.
- amalcon 16y agoThe electrical engineering thing demonstrates that you're unlikely to get a particular discipline to change its own notation. It would have made much more sense in retrospect to change current to something other than i, but that's not what happened.
- nooneelse 16y agoAs an electrical engineer (by way of physics and math), I'll use any other damn letter that makes sense for current that you want, and try to sway my fellows too. I just haven't seen a good option yet. What have you got? "c"... no good, speed of light for one; and also current needs good a good alteration for DC vs AC, "c" and "C" look too similar when written by someone else's hand (and "C" is crap in equations anyway since it can look too much like a "("). Current is a flow, but "f" is well used. Any good suggestions?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Locke1689 16y agoAgreed. He mentions overloading the pi symbol for the prime counting function but the difference is that you very rarely encounter pi in the prime counting function.