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I would like to bring to the attention of the dakka community the Tau Manifesto. This has nothing to do whatsoever with the Tau of warhammer 40k, so Please don’t make any dumb comments about it.

Basically it’s a correction for the use of the number Pi. Everyone knows that it’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, but that’s not right. The true circle ratio is the ratio between its radius and its circumference. Anyway, I’m not going to rewrite the whole thing for you, you should go read about it

Here: http://tauday.com/

I find this absolutely TAUrrific.


I read the manifesto, and while I'm not the best person on this forum to ask about math (Not TAUrrible at it, just not the best to ask) it seems to make sense enough to at least be a footnote in any new textbooks to be released.

But I f will Embrace the Tau with Open arms.


Edit: couldn't help myself. Part of the PDF asks about puns. I was going to be nice until I saw that little bit.

Yeah this pretty much seems to be a case of unimportant semantics, besides physics and engineering have already taken tau. (It's used for torque).

How is April 25 Tau day?

Shouldn't it be June 28?

Also, we already use tau. Maybe it should be Xi. Nobody likes Xi.

biccat wrote:How is April 25 Tau day?

Shouldn't it be June 28?

Also, we already use tau. Maybe it should be Xi. Nobody likes Xi.

It is june the 28th tauday is also the name of the website. I don't know why they are using the letter tau but lots of other things get overused too. Delta and Lambda for example.

Ledabot wrote:

biccat wrote:How is April 25 Tau day?

Shouldn't it be June 28?

Also, we already use tau. Maybe it should be Xi. Nobody likes Xi.

It is june the 28th tauday is also the name of the website. I don't know why they are using the letter tau but lots of other things get overused too. Delta and Lambda for example.

Delta and Lambda aren't overused at all. They both have one use.
Delta is used in two ways, as an uppercase to denote finite increments of some value and in lower case to denote infinitismal increments of some value
Lambda represents the wavelength of light.

Nerdiest. Thread. Ever.

And that's saying a lot on here

I hate to see people arguing about imaginary numbers.

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:I hate to see people arguing about imaginary numbers.

As we all know, elevendybazillion is way bigger than a gajillion.

My math is solid. Any challengers who dare refute my logic, come at me!

Chowderhead wrote:

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:I hate to see people arguing about imaginary numbers.

As we all know, elevendybazillion is way bigger than a gajillion.

My math is solid. Any challengers who dare refute my logic, come at me!

My calculators say. . . . you are wrong!

I'm TAUribble at math, but it was a neat read, even if I didn't understand any of it.

This is a fairly unnecessary constant.

Tau = pi*2

Why does that need a whole new letter and revision of textbooks?

Krellnus wrote:Delta and Lambda aren't overused at all. They both have one use.
Delta is used in two ways, as an uppercase to denote finite increments of some value and in lower case to denote infinitismal increments of some value
Lambda represents the wavelength of light any wave.

Fixed that for you.

But, those aren't the only uses for those letters.

Even in just physics (and ignoring particle physics), lower-case lambda also represents the linear charge density. And, lower-case delta can mean Kronecker delta (a mathematical function).

Its not unnecessary, it was pi that was the unnecessary one. This is but a correction.

But pi is not unnecssary, there is nothing to correct. The 'correction' they propose will be identical to 2pi and trust me it is much less difficult to double something in a long equation than it is to half it.