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> There might be better ways to introduce pi To be fair that's the elementary school way of defining pi. I'm somewhat rusty myself, but I'm pretty sure even un
by qsort 6y ago
> There might be better ways to introduce pi
To be fair that's the elementary school way of defining pi. I'm somewhat rusty myself, but I'm pretty sure even undergraduate real analysis courses define pi in terms of the complex exponential. "Ratio of circumference to diameter" is insanely hard to make rigorous.
- Tainnor 6y agoMy undergraduate real analysis course didn't, probably because here, I don't think complex numbers are necessarily part of the high school curriculum. Instead, we defined sin and cos via power series, and then IIRC, pi as the first positive zero of the sin function or something similar.