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Happy Tau Day!

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fladdermasken

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you really believe in this shit? lol
In what? Mathematics?

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the tau manifesto, you could argue that it's fundamentally pontless though (or fundamentally not-awesome). Pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, where as tau is the circumference divided by the radius (or 2 * pi).
 
Either way works, honestly it'd be most convenient to use both and use whatever one's most convenient for the circumstances (which in a lot of cases would be Tau).

Mathmatically both are perfectly correct, there are no grounds to say Tau isn't right because you can easily show it through the math, no need to get butthurt over a factor of 2.


For those who don't know what Tau is and what it has to do with Pi, this girl does a good job in explaining it:

 

fladdermasken

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I still believe that Pi is correct.
And you were never told not to, don't get confused by the headers in the tau manifesto, they're only there to pull attention.
As such:


This is what the tau manifesto is about:
It should be obvious that π is not “wrong” in the sense of being factually incorrect; the number π is perfectly well-defined, and it has all the properties normally ascribed to it by mathematicians. When we say that “π is wrong”, we mean that π is a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant.
Try to read a couple of paragraphs, or at least sentences.
 
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Whatever makes math less of a brainbreaker.

You and Tau will become very good friends then
At least if anything it makes radians much easier to visualize, which I've always found to be a pain (pretty much going through the Tau conversation when I try to visualize it without thinking about it (without thinking about it meaning I sort of sorted out that method on my own without knowing of tau's existence, basically just taking however much Pi you actually want and then working with that factor of 2)).
 

fladdermasken

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The whole point of Tau is just simplifying the process, it's not really all that much different
And since the difference is so minimal, is it really worth jumping through hoops for? We as a society chose pi over history because pi was discovered first, refashioning the constant after several thousands of years for something so arbitrary and trivial seems a little extreme.
 
Really that's how I see it, more of a personal choice then anything
Not like anyone's up and arms to protest the tyranny of Pi or anything

But it would be nice to be able to use Tau in calculations and feel secure in that it'd be graded fairly, since you can show it all in the math that it's correct and get the same output should you have used Pi.
 
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And since the difference is so minimal, is it really worth jumping through hoops for? We as a society chose pi over history because pi was discovered first, refashioning the constant after several thousands of years for something so arbitrary and trivial seems a little extreme.

Why not? As we become wiser why not simplify the process and deal with the transition now so that it's but a bit easier in the future.

We're always going to be computing increasingly larger calculations and deriving even more complex equations, anything that simplifies the process for future generations, if even the slightest bit, is worth bringing up in my opinion.


That being said, I'm not some pro-Tau loon and I don't really think it's a big deal or anything. I just saw this posted on Facebook and didn't know about it before hand. I thought it was pretty neat so I just thought I'd share it for those who weren't aware.
 
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I'm not sure if many serious mathematicians actually care about this, or could care enough about it. I agree with fladder.

WherewolfTherewolf said:
The whole point of Tau is just simplifying the process, it's not really all that much different
The only real simplification I can think of, and the only real simplification that she presented, was the visualization of trigonometric functions using fractions of tau as opposed to fractions of pi. It's hardly a simplification at all, and it really isn't a huge step from pi/2 = tau/4 = 2pi/4. If you can't make that realization, then you have bigger problems. The rest of pretty much anything serious involving pi is too complicated to be visually 'understood' anyway.

And if you're talking about some kind of computing simplification, well I don't see how that's relevant at all since it depends entirely on the expression that you're dealt, and there are tons of expressions that deal with fractions of pi as opposed to 2pi.

EDIT:
And for extra laughs.
 
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