Talk:Pi: Difference between revisions
→Task split: pi vs tau
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:::::Ugh. Can we not have that debate here? The ''only'' significant difference between pi and tau is the impact they may have on the readability and intuitive extrapolation of formulas. I see enough difficulty agreeing on task spec as is, and pi vs tau is not clearly resolvable. For the time being, I would far prefer to stick with pi, as that's the most common and mass way of representing the number, and so that's what people are more likely to recognize and understand. When [http://googlefight.com/index.php?&word1=pi&word2=tau tau beats pi by a 2:1 margin], I might be more interested. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 14:21, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
::::::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)
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