4 ms·
2 Pi or Not 2 Pi?
- ddrum001 11y agoI don't think there is much to discuss here, tau=2pi is clearly the more sensible constant for almost every use case. The only question is whether we give in to conventions, or pay the one-time technical debt of switching. We (in the US) may never convert to metric, but the much smaller community who works with pi regularly should know better.
- brobdingnagian 11y agoDid you read the article? It is clearly not "the more sensible constant for almost every use case."
- paul_f 11y agoThe single greatest mathematical equation is e^i*pi = -1 No way we mess with that.
- fnayr 11y ago-Feynman
- gizmo686 11y agoe^i * tau -1 = 0 To my eye as a mathematician, the tau version I provided looks better. e^i * tau = 1, has a much nicer geometric interperatation, of e^i * tau representing a full rotation (which is just the identity), whereas e^i * pi = -1 represents half a rotation, and it is not quite as immediately obvious that -1 is a 1/2 rotation (although this is not particularly opaque). While I am on the subject, surely the equation you want to discuss is e^i * pi * x, = cos(pi * x)+isin(pi * x), which clearly represents a rotation of x/2 of a complete circle. Of course, viewing it this way, it seems even clearer why one would want to use tau.