Anonymous user
Talk:Pi: Difference between revisions
→Task split
(→Task split: pi vs tau) |
|||
Line 67:
::::::That's not exactly an argument on merits. And there's no reason for the use of tau to exclude the use of pi any more than the use of the number 1 excludes the use of the number 0.5. That said, if googlefight meant anything to me, I might use a smaller set of numbers? --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 19:58, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
:::::::No, it's not an argument on the merits. The best thing I've read on the merits of the subject is [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3481 here], and all that tells me is that we don't know which is really better than the other. The trouble with pi vs tau on RC is that your average ''non''-mathematician isn't yet likely to be familiar with tau, and so using tau in tasks is very likely to confuse what should be a simple subject; to resolve the confusion, use of tau would need annotations like "tau is 2*pi", and that would strike me as too trivial to warrant further complicating the task description. In short, even if we posit tau to be a more elegant symbol than pi, right ''now'', it's not a more elegant way to write task descriptions. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 21:07, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
::::::: But there's no exact arguments on merits. Tau vs Pi is really a matter of radius vs diameter of a circle, and you can't argue which is of more merit than the other. A well defined constant should convey most symmetry or invariance of a system, where radius is arguably better because one end of r is always at the origin--but in real world diameters are almost always easier to measure: try directly tell the radius of a ball bearing with a caliper. In any event, for calculating digits of pi, the tau debate is not even relevant, where the most useful constant is probably Pi/4 any way. --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 21:55, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
| |||