Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

And 22/7 should be pi day, not 3/14

That's known as "Pi Approximation Day" - http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=955

Actually PI day should be 6/28. It makes a lot of important formulas simpler... makes me sad we still teach PI, when TAU is mostly superior :P

pi is superior in this respect: If you plug tau into euler's magic formula (e^(tau * i) == 1) it's mostly confusing, but if you plug pi in, (e ^ (pi * i) == -1), it's profound.

Maybe you developed intuition for one but not the other. It's not at all obvious what kind of difference you perceived.

The first case is trivially solvable if tau == 0, or alternatively gives little insight into how imaginary exponents work because 1 is positive. A negative result of the exponentiation function is glaringly unusual, and provokes one to question "what exactly is going on here?", Without being unnecessarily complex (as is the case for nonmultiples of pi)

but to explain the importance of pi because of complex numbers is still not obvious, it seems to hinge on the imaginary number, which to be honest I know next to nothing about so I don't see the connection.

That's arguable. That the equation is satisfied by both tau and zero hints that complex exponentiation is periodic.

I strongly feel that mathematicians prefer the more complex form because it seems mysterious and mystical, which is fun for them but less pedagogically useful.

Are there 22 months in your year or 14?

(That is: It seems weird to express one date as month-last and the other as month-first.)

Parent poster was rejecting the month-first version.

Then why didn't he write it as 14/3?

Anyhow, I thought he was more narrowly saying that 22/7 is closer to the true value of pi than 3.14 is.

Because 3.14 is the approximation of Pi. And yes, that is the reasoning.

month-first or month-last doesn't matter, until you add more time periods. YY/MM/DD and DD/MM/YY are both fine, but MM/DD/YY is braindead. Month-first gains the edge, though, when you add time-of-day, since no-one does ss/mm/hh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com