I like the idea of Tau but "pi is wrong" is wrong. Pi is correct.<p>The pitch for Tau is as a replacement for Pi. That it is more logical than Pi.<p>Tau has an important lesson to tell: intuition is important and in many cases shifting things around so they're easier to create an intuitive understanding is often very trivial and boils down to aesthetic/representation choices.<p>Claiming that "pi is wrong" is picking a fight that doesn't need to be fought with a crowd that will not be convinced.<p>Instead, if I were a more full Tau advocate I would do more along the lines of Khalid from Betterexplained and seek to find other interesting intuitive takes on dry topics that are often taught by wrote.
That was a surprisingly entertaining and well-researched manifesto.<p>In the same spirit, I think it is time to rethink the verb 'to be': the only consistent conjugation is obviously 'I/you are; he ares; we/you/they are'. And similarly the past tense should be 'ared' instead of 'was/were'. Generations of children have been getting themselves needlessly confused because of this terrible convention!<p>Would it be possible to correct this wrong? Or do you think the time for doing so has passed and, by now, it are what it are.
Why do people even measure rotations in radians? It’s a stupid unit that’s never ever written out but always expressed as either “pi radians” or “tau radians”, and just like with degrees, or the measure which has 200 to a circle you end up spending time teaching students how to convert to the sensible unit we all default to, which is just plain rotations. Everyone understands intuitively half a rotation. A full rotation or a quarter rotation. And when you tell a student 30 degrees, they all spend a bit of mental effort thinking before they go “Ah yes, 1/12 of a full rotation” and if you tell them 0.52 radians they’ll just look at you blankly stating they need a calculator before they know what are you are on about.
There's a bad science fiction story in here = humans broadcast pi to the stars in many different formats, but nearby aliens sail right past oblivious, mistaking the signal for random noise because their maths uses tau.
Convinced me that PI is in fact wrong.<p>I had thought myself sometimes why there was always 2PI everywhere and how PI was half a circle (instead of a whole).
I was always eventually convinced by the PI<i>r^2 = area function that PI must be correct. Also a lot of people thought about it for a long time right?<p>The example that many other surface area functions have 1/2 in them convinces me that the function should be 1/2 </i> TAU * r^2.<p>Good luck convincing the rest of us degenerates.
Figure 2 in that article, illustrating a constant-width figure with three sides (a Reuleaux triangle), reminded me of a science fiction story from long ago. I finally found the title: it's "The Three-Cornered Wheel" by Poul Anderson. A spaceship crew on an alien planet needs to transport something heavy but the natives worship circles and won't let them use cylindrical rollers. They eventually find a solution that satisfies everyone.
The problem here is that pi shows up in a lot of places that have nothing to do with circles, and in those places tau does not do better (it frequently does worse). It's just not worth the hassle to make it the default, and I say this as someone who celebrates tau day every year (but I call it "my birthday" instead :P)
Over the years I've seen a number of similar articles on pi and tau but I reckon this one is by far the most comprehensive. All have the same thread and it's a shame that tau and pi weren't reversed in meaning from the outset as clearly this would have simplified many things. For example (as the article mentions) the number of times I've see this
ℏ=h/2π explained or alternatively its explanation omitted when it should have been explained is numerous. With tau, all that could have been omitted.<p>Moreover, it seems to me that starting with tau is more logical in that a circle results from the rotation of the radius, still nothing will change as pi is so absolutely entrenched.
While we're trying to change the status quo in mathematics around the world, let's also all switch to the World Calendar and start using Base 12.
Yes, we should be using a circle constant that has a value twice that of "pi".<p>We should not be calling it "tau". That's already used for too many things, and anyway the constant is important enough to deserve its own symbol.<p>Instead of cutting it down from two verticals to one, we should add a symbol that has <i>three</i> verticals. Which has the additional advantage of giving a real visual cue to what's going on.
I only found out Tau where there was a slightly heated discussion about adding it to Ruby Core[1], still unsure if this is needed or required.<p>And somehow at the same time The Tau Manifesto is written by Michael Hartl, who also wrote <i>the</i> Ruby on Rails Tutorial .<p>[1] <a href="https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17496" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17496</a>
Every year, I look forward to the comments here of that page. Tauday, like the SR-71 ground check story, I’ll happily read the comments every time it’s posted.