"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."<p>I don't think it's overly "grandiose"... what other language can express such fundamentals and find relationships between them?<p>And so mathematical understanding will always benefit from natural simplifications.<p>There's no "issue" if we just allow both pi and tau -- calling on each as it suits the equations at hand.<p>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.<p>Then we can celebrate March 14th and June 28th with equal fan-fare.