Bye-Bye Pi

[Rade]

Looks like it is time to say goodbye to Pi.

 

Welcome Tau:

 

http://news.yahoo.com/mathematicians-want-goodbye-pi-154001699.html

[CraigD]

Looks like it is time to say goodbye to Pi.

 

Welcome Tau:

 

http://news.yahoo.com/mathematicians-want-goodbye-pi-154001699.html

 

I think we should just append this (give a bump to) our old (2007) 11138, as it seems to be another page in the old “pi is wrong” discussion Utah U’s Bob Palais started back in 2001. If nobody objects in the next day or two, I will.

 

The gist of this new twist is, I gather, Michael Hartel (an all-round smart and well-educated guy, know best to programmer types like me from having written some good tutorial on the Ruby programming language and its Rails webapp framework.) pretty much likes what Palais had to say in ”π is wrong”, but thinks Palais was wrong to invent a weird new symbol that nobody uses or seems even to know what to call (“\newpi” in LaTeX:Math, though hardly any implementation of it has this symbol predefined), and we should instead use the good old greek letter τ (tau).

 

Personally, I’m like the old idea that the best symbol for 2 π is 2π (just the two standard symbols smushed together), which Palais in his page on the ongoing “pi is wrong” discussion notes that Peter Harremoes researched the idea and discovered that there is an obscure history of this use dating back at least as early as 1889. If you want to get especially perverse, you could argue that [math]2\pi = \frac{\hbar}{h}[/math] (“h bar”, reduces Planck’s constant over Plank’s constant), so perhaps [imath]2\pi = \bar{ }[/imath], which we could call just “bar”. Looking almost exactly like a minus sign is a bit of a drawback, though. ;)

 

This discussion is good, I think, because it makes us think about our choices for ubiquitous transcendental numbers. Nobody’s really seriously saying Pi is done for, of course, just that instead of writing expressions like [imath]a=\pi \, r^2[/imath] and [imath]c=2 \, \pi \, r[/imath], we’d be better off writing ones [imath]a=\frac{\tau \, r^2}{2} [/imath] and [imath]c=\tau \, r[/imath], or [imath]a=\frac{2\pi \, r^2}{2} [/imath] and [imath]c=2\pi \, r[/imath].

[Rade]

Craig comment

Thank you.

 

After reading your post, I would vote for keeping 2π where it is needed in equations and leave tau [imath]\tau\[/imath] for other uses more closely related to time. Also, consider that 4π is used in many equations, how does it help understand is we need to substitute 2[imath]\tau\[/imath] for 4π ?

[suresh123]

If pi is wrong then Tou must be replace it,but I think in 5 to 10th grade maths problems are can be solved with pi, answers of previous classes are wrong?please help me .

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