
Tau is easier than Pi (2014) - ajoy
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-s-easier-than-pi/
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senderista
I have yet to hear of a single well-known mathematician who gives a damn about
this.

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surewhynat
The largest benefit as far as I can see is to lower the barrier of entry to
mathematics for young people. Well known mathematicians have already passed
this barrier so perhaps it's not as relatable a problem to them. I for one
would have loved to learn Tau instead of Pi, and I believe educators would
love to have a more engaged classroom as well.

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geoalchimista
Does defining tau := 2 * pi make math easier at all?

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ncmncm
Yes. In particular, teaching tau instead of pi makes many operations in
trigonometry more intuitive.

It doesn't matter to mathematicians because they have spent many years
learning to suppress their intuition. It does matter to engineers and
technicians.

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gigama
"For mathematicians, pi obscures some of the underlying symmetries of
mathematics and muddies up what should be elegant with extraneous factors of
two. There’s an admittedly grandiose idea that mathematics is the language
with which we express and see certain underpinning truths to the universe."

I don't think it's overly "grandiose"... what other language can express such
fundamentals and find relationships between them?

And so mathematical understanding will always benefit from natural
simplifications.

There's no "issue" if we just allow both pi and tau -- calling on each as it
suits the equations at hand.

They're both symbols for irrational numbers so use whichever has the least
number of terms. If you mean pi use pi and if you mean 2 * pi, as is common in
Fourier transforms, just use tau. Teach both and negate the popularity
contests.

Then we can celebrate March 14th and June 28th with equal fan-fare.

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BoiledCabbage
Read the actual 'Tao Manifesto" webpage which does a much better job of
describing it than this article.

[https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto](https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto)

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smitty1e
> Manifesto author Michael Hartl received his PhD in theoretical physics from
> the California Institute of Technology and is only one in a string of
> established players beginning to question the orthodoxy.

Oh, I get it. Hartl is the Learn Enough[1] and especially Ruby on Rails
Tutorial[2] guy. This whole Tau thing is a cryptic anti-Python troll.

[1] [https://www.learnenough.com/](https://www.learnenough.com/)

[2] [https://www.learnenough.com/ruby-on-rails-6th-
edition](https://www.learnenough.com/ruby-on-rails-6th-edition)

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ncmncm
Obviously not.

