Timeline for Pi or Tau? How should the circle constant be taught?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
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| Jan 11, 2016 at 7:17 | comment | added | Daniel McLaury | @Jasper: But the fact that humans have ten fingers is surely arbitrary. If we were canids rather than hominids we'd have eight. Ten fingers per hand is just an accident of how life happened to evolve on Earth. | |
| Sep 27, 2015 at 3:34 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Garret: Great post, and thank you for speaking from the perspective of someone who's actually used it in class. (Of course, I'm already in the choir.) | |
| Apr 30, 2014 at 12:33 | comment | added | Jasper | I don't think that Base ten is arbitrary at all (fingers), but at least the metric system has a single base and not arbitrary factors between different units (12 inch = 1 foot, 3 feet=1 yard). | |
| Apr 30, 2014 at 1:54 | comment | added | dan04 | @Jasper: Base ten is arbitrary, too. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 18:46 | comment | added | Andrew Stacey | The imperial/metric analogy is stretched somewhat. The conversion factor is just 2 for pi/tau but is rather more complicated from imperial to metric (feet to metres, inches to centimetres, and so on). However, my disagreement with this answer is more fundamental. The third reference you link to is brilliant: it undermines the whole rationale for tau in the final paragraph of Section 5.1 where it concludes that "the fundamental constant uniting the geometry of n-spheres is the measure of a right angle". Now that I can agree with and if we defined tau=pi/2 then I'd happily lead the revolution. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 18:07 | comment | added | Garrett | @Jasper, that's true, but also consider that the costs of switching a country from imperial to metric is orders of magnitude higher than switching from $\pi$ to $\tau$. I think the analogy is OK, just that it's at a larger scale. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 17:42 | comment | added | Ruben | +1 for you approach! I love that you actually try to move forward and make things easier. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 11:35 | comment | added | Jasper | I disagree with the imperial/metric example because metric is orders of magnitude better (base 10 vs arbitrary steps to go to larger/smaller units of measurement), and pi vs tau is just a matter of a constant factor. | |
| Apr 16, 2014 at 8:45 | history | edited | Garrett | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 16, 2014 at 8:43 | review | First posts | |||
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| Apr 16, 2014 at 8:35 | history | edited | Garrett | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 16, 2014 at 8:23 | history | answered | Garrett | CC BY-SA 3.0 |