But you might say, of course, that those fields of mathematics which tau makes "easier" are the ones important in early math education (especially below the university level). Hence adopting tau would make them substantially friendlier and more intuitive to many people. While the idea of "fixing" math concept to make them more bearable to laymen should not be dismissed automatically, I would like to point out that the question of tau vs. 2pi is by no means the only issue of this kind. Indeed, there are a couple of more "warts" in everyday maths that could also warrant "fixing". Consider:
* The direction in which positive and negative angles on two-dimensional, Cartesian plane are measured [1]. Counter-intuitively, the measure increases when going counterclockwise, while going clockwise decreases it.
* The main diagonal [2] of a matrix goes from upper-left to lower-right corner, which coincides with the shape of backslash character.
* The established order of indices for matrix' elements is row-column, so that A_xy refers to element in x-th row and y-th column of matrix A. This goes against the habit of specifying the horizontal coordinate before the vertical coordinate when talking about XY planes [3].
* Definition of convex [4] and concave [5] functions (for R->R ones) do not agree with the intuitive associations based on plots of those functions. Clearly, the convex one looks like a valley, and the concave one resembles a hill or mountain.
I'm sure there are many more examples of such unreasonable, counter-intuitive conventions, so we really have a lot of work ahead of us. So, anyone fancies writing the Slash Diagonal Manifesto?...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle#Positive_and_negative_ang... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_diagonal [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system#Car... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concave_function