Tuesday, July 05, 2011

More on Pi and Tau

Mike from Spiked Math has issued his own Pi Manifesto in response to other mathematicians who would wish to dispose of of pi in favor the nonsensical tau. (Go ahead look it up. "Nonsensical", I mean. You really don't need to look up tau.)

One simple reason the switch would never work for me: my students don't even use radians yet. And I, along with my colleagues, spend hours before every Mathematics Regents exam not only resetting calculators and clearing their memories, but also switching them to degree mode because the default is radians, and the student might fail to recognize that. And they shouldn't lose points because of a quirk of technology.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi All,

There are related mathematics and algorithms problem here, for those who love mathematics / algorithm problem solviing Mathalon , after all whats in mathematics without problems.

-Hemant