Oooh - I like that new word - thanks to repeating decimal! What is involved is the concept of bases other than base 10, specifically octal, but that is also a secondary school subject, both in mathematics and computer science. The main reason is that the ‘tauists’ don’t get out into the real world all that much, and are facinated by mathematical tricks. Vi Hart, the wonderful and precocious niece of one of my best friends Kathleen, makes a very persuasive case for tau = 2*pi and there are, indeed, far too many fundamentally important equations in physics and math that are littered with ungainly factors of 2*pi--for example, Euler's beautiful formula for the Euler-Riemann zeta function for any positive even number 2*n: zeta(2*n) = [(-1)^(n+1)]*{B_2*n}*[(2*pi)^(2*n)]/2/[(2*n)! I should try harder 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 14:41, 14 March 2017 (UTC), http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/g/gasolpa01.html, I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1292:_Pi_vs._Tau&oldid=193354. If 200 were octal, that would be 128 decimal, so we would end up writing 128 decimals. Just saying. Bob Palais classic article π is Wrong! = \frac{\tau^4 r^8}{8 \cdot 6 \cdot 4 \cdot 2}\], \[\frac{2 \tau^4 r^8}{7!!} = \frac{\tau^2 r^3}{2}\], \[\frac{\tau^2 r^4}{4!!} Also, kappa is usefully a real number betweem 0 and 1, for whatever that's worth! Today is 6/28, making it Tau Day! You even mentioned that the only reason we used it was because of primitive measuring tools, which isn't a good reason at all. Finally, "pau" means "finished" in Hawaiian. Likewise e^i tau = 1 makes sense because an entire turn leaves you where you are. However, this is not the case, and was likely due to an error in the computer system used by WolframAlpha; for more details see below. Therefore, if 6666 is counted as two occurrences of 666, it is actually the joint second most common string of three numbers in the first 500 digits. However, when the comic was published, there was a bug in Wolfram|Alpha so that, when getting 200 octal digits from "pau", it just calculates the decimal value rounded to 15 significant digits (this is 4.71238898038469) and expands that as octal digits as far as needed. It seems as tho Wolfram is rounding pi*1.5 to around 15 decimals but leaving the 9 repeating before converting to Octal. --ulm (talk) 10:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC). The decimal value of pi (using a(1) * 4) matches with the value of pi to at lease 1000 digits. η Diameterians? Still, the choice of pi vs. tau can affect the clarity of equations, analogies between different equations, and how easy various subjects are to teach. = \frac{2 \tau^2 r^4}{3}\], \[\frac{2 \tau^2 r^5}{5!!} This leaves little or no doubts in me that Wolfram is the source of Randall's mistake. Maybe you would like to have them bigger: I'll explain how I did this visualization in a live stream on Twitch or explain the code here on the blog in the the next couple of days. = \frac{\tau^4 r^7}{6 \cdot 4 \cdot 2}\], \[\frac{\tau^4 r^8}{8!!} The, here's a clear and simple Unit Circle tutorial, Vi Hart explain why Tau (τ) is a better alternative to Pi, Dr. Kevin Houston has another excellent intro to Tau, Vi Hart even recently released a Tau Day song, a much deeper look at the effects of Tau in a 51-minute lecture, David Butler's video shows the surprising uses of Eta, US Constitutional Amendment Mnemonics (Part I), How To Instantly Convert Weeks to Minutes. = \frac{\eta^4 D^7}{6 \cdot 4}\], \[\frac{\tau^1 r^2}{2!!} This Mathematica code searches for the pattern 666 in the octal expansion of 1.5 pi: These positions start counting with the leading "4" as position 1. We are selling at, We are excited to visit SpaceX on October 24th, 2014. It's not worth your time trying to understand the concepts here."? So pi is really just a historical mistake, and it wouldn't be so difficult to fix this mistake if it weren't for people trying to make excuses for pi like saying "it doesn't matter" (interestingly, I find that most people who say this are pi supporters just using it as a reason to still use pi when it is clearly inelegant and not bringing anything new to the debate). = =! Rather, according to The Tau Manifesto, "pi is a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant." Invited to Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu, are they worthwhile and worth the fee? --173.245.53.184 17:52, 18 November 2013 (UTC). 45 degrees, or pi/4); (pi/4 * 6) should be equal to 'pau'. Grey Matters is my website. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! is 24, 11, 3, 4. Dcoetzee (talk) 06:44, 19 November 2013 (UTC), Wow, this filled up fast. Of course 310 octal is 200 decimal, but taking 2008 to mean 31010 is plain crazy, even if it's the only way to make it fit the "four times 666" constraint! = \frac{2 \tau^3 r^6}{5 \cdot 3}\], \[\frac{2 \tau^3 r^7}{7!!} Personally, given my last name (Furlong), which is defined to be 1/8 of a mile and is most often encountered in horse racing, I think that kappa = tau/8 = pi/4 = eta/2 = 0.7853398163397448... would be another fine choice for a fundamental transcendental constant number if for no other reason than that kappa is the first Greek letter in the Greek word for a circle, kuklos! However, Grey Matters is not about me. But for geometric ratios (which these are), the appropriate mean is generally the geometric mean (hence the name). Many other digit combinations occur more times in the first 10,000 digits, including "123" (23 times), "222" (21 times), and "555" (26 times). If you take the output of octal(pi * 1.5) and paste it back into the input like so: Wolfram gives you back (converted to decimal): If you give that same input to BC and ask it to convert to decimal you get: If you do the math long hand out to 55 decimal places, pi * 1.5 equals: Converting that by hand into octal is a bit of a pain, but if you do, at the 18th decimal place where BC and Wolfram differ you end up with the following: Wolfram gives the 18th decimal as 5, BC as 3. Americans wanted 32 bytes of data per cell, to support DS0 data rates, IIRC. The standard explain, containing the essentials like shown by 108.162.219.43 just before. = \frac{2 \tau r^3}{3}\], \[\frac{\eta^1 D^2}{2!!} There's plenty of support for Tau. Let's compare what happens to all the n-sphere areas and n-ball volumes when we use \(\tau\)-and-radius (\(r\)) vs. \(\eta\)-and-diameter (\(D\)). Also, I still would like to know why everybody is interpreting "200 digits" as "2008 digits" and pretending that's equal to "31010 digits" instead of "12810 digits". holds with that value. Keep it pi. = \frac{2 \tau^4 r^8}{7 \cdot 5 \cdot 3}\], \[\frac{2 \tau^4 r^9}{9!!} The new challenger is Eta (η), which is ½π, effectively the inverse of Tau. To the first commenter here:Saying "pi reflects the long history of mathematics" is an argument from tradition. There is not even any elementary trigonometry involved here, other than the value of PI itself. We could call these units “diameterians”, which would be equal to 2 radians. Copyright © 2010 Grey Matters: Blog.Wordpress Theme by Paddsolutions. The appearences of the extra factor of 2 comes that Kodegadulo sees from two different sources. "Diameterans" don't work. Tau Beta Pi [engineering] addition, three of the engineering major specific societies (Alpha Eta Mu Beta, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Gamma Tau) are not ACHS members. If you want to be one of the first you might want to subscribe on Patreon. They each seem to have a ~$60 fee to join. Pi, (ref: http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/g/gasolpa01.html ), to which neither Tau nor Pi can hold a candle.~~Remo ( 199.27.128.183 19:19, 18 November 2013 (UTC) ). Many more occurrences can be found here: Note that "pau" is Catalan for peace, which might be a good solution for the pi/tau dispute; but Tahitian for peace is "tau", so (appropriately?) There are real world uses to both Tau and Pi: Pi is the number that relates to what you get when you measure a circle (the distanced around divided by the distance across); and Tau is get when you draw a circle (the distance around divided by the distance from the center). It also attributes the nickname "Devil's Ratio" to pau, due to the sequence 666 supposedly appearing four times in the first 200 digits of pau when expressed in the octal base. Neither side would capitulate, so they went with 48 bytes, which is worse than either for both sides. 173.245.48.91 21:00, 9 June 2015 (UTC), Happy Pi Day! He didn't say anything about them being distinct times.