How pi was almost 6.283185...
Happy pi day! Did you know that in some of his notes, Euler used the symbol pi to represent 6.28..., before the more familiar 3.14... took off as a standard?
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I’m sure you’re well-familiar with the whole pi vs. tau debate. Many people say that the fundamental circle constant we hold up should be the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, around 6.28, not the ratio to its diameter, the more familiar 3.14. These days we call this larger constant “tau”, popularized by Michael Hartl’s “Tau manifesto”, although personally, I’m quite partial to Robert Palais’ proposed notation of a pi with three legs. In this manifesto and many other places on the internet, you can read to no end about how many formulas look at lot cleaner using tau, largely because the number of radians describing a given fraction of a circle is actually that fraction of tau. That dead horse is beat, I’m not here to make the case further. Instead I’d ...
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I’m sure you’re well-familiar with the whole pi vs. tau debate. Many people say that the fundamental circle constant we hold up should be the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius, around 6.28, not the ratio to its diameter, the more familiar 3.14. These days we call this larger constant “tau”, popularized by Michael Hartl’s “Tau manifesto”, although personally, I’m quite partial to Robert Palais’ proposed notation of a pi with three legs. In this manifesto and many other places on the internet, you can read to no end about how many formulas look at lot cleaner using tau, largely because the number of radians describing a given fraction of a circle is actually that fraction of tau. That dead horse is beat, I’m not here to make the case further. Instead I’d ...
