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rmunntoday at 8:09 AM1 replyview on HN

Oh, pi has its place: in engineering, for example, it's much easier to measure the diameter of a pipe than its radius: just put calipers around the widest point (outside or inside depending) and you have the diameter. In fact, you probably wouldn't ever measure the radius; in places where you need the radius, you'd just measure the diameter and divide by 2.

But for teaching trig? Explaining radians should definitely be tau-based.


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cboltontoday at 12:03 PM

Do you mean the advantage of writing pi*d for the circumference instead of tau*r or tau*d/2? I wouldn't keep pi around just for this...

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