5 ms·
The practical problem with tau is, as was pointed out in the article, tau is already used for other things. Shear stress, torque, time constants, you name it.
by kwantam 15y ago
The practical problem with tau is, as was pointed out in the article, tau is already used for other things. Shear stress, torque, time constants, you name it.
pi is a notational freak in that it represents something so fundamental that few dare tread upon the usage---pi truly is a globally reserved name. To a lesser extent, the same is true of e, but even a number as important as i doesn't enjoy this property: electrical engineers use j for sqrt(-1) because i is current.
So let's say we all start using tau. Then I decide I'm going to do some basic rotational mechanics, and now I have two taus, one for torque and one for 2pi. OK, that's a no-go. How about we just redefine pi=2pi? Well... how do we know whether someone means pi=~6.28, or pi=~3.14?
It's just no good. Tau is not a viable candidate name for the constant equal to 2pi. Find another character in another language. How about Pei (Hebrew)?
- sesqu 15y agoPi is not globally reserved. It is commonly used in, for example, statistics to refer to multinomial probabilities, and wikipedia tells me it's also the name of the prime-counting function and parallax. I should note that this was annoying to me when dealing with IRT, in which some models have 2pi in the normalizing constants. Not to say tau isn't used in statistics already as well. There just aren't enough greek letters. I have wondered about what the symbol for tau should be, and I keep thinking of a circle including a radius line that extends slightly outside the circle, but tau is much easier to write, especially when using ascii.