When I read this article a while back the part that impressed me was how in intuitive radians become:

  2/3 * NewPi = (2/3's around the circle in radians).  

Probably the only drawback is when doing wicked tricks on a snowboarding game such as SSX. Doing a 1080 just sounds cooler then a 3, but which is more intuitive?=)

The pdf claims that for simplicity sake, the constant pi should have been a factor of two larger.

Reminds me of electrical engineering "mistakes" such as the convention establishing electrons as negatively charged; or the ohm being very small/amp being very large compared to everyday usage.

Well, next monday we can celebrate 6/28 as 2pi day or proper pi day... Just in time article.

the idea may seem trite, but the pedagogical motivation for making certain symmetries more apparent in mathematics is sound.

on an unrelated note, when will the scribd links switch to html5?

Same thing happened with the gamma function. MathOverflow:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/20960/why-is-the-gamma-fun...

Unfortunately the article is down at the moment, but there's a beautiful identity that suggests that maybe pi/4 is a constant of nature, not pi:

pi/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 ...

That's arguing from pure mathematics. Judging from the comments, I think the article argues (from kind of an engineering point of view) that 2pi would be more convenient.

Old news. This ranks up there with the fact that it was a bad idea to use base 10 instead of base 12. Absolutely and utterly true, but completely not worth the switching costs.

Very interesting article.

On a related not, check out the book "Negative Math": http://www.amazon.com/Negative-Math-Mathematical-Rules-Posit...

This book builds up a mathematics in which multiplying two negative numbers gives you a negative, not a positive. The results are very interesting, particularly this: There are no complex numbers. The root of -1 is -1.

This is another example of something you never think to question, you always assume is "just the natural way", but which was a somewhat arbitrary choice and can be changed.

I seriously have always suspected this. If you're going to use a value to represent the perfection of a circle, why not take the derivatives of its properties (area, then perimeter, and once more) until you get a constant? 2pi is that constant.

One of my math professors pointed out that to be consistent, "π, φ, χ, ψ, ξ, and ι" should actually be pronounced "pee, fee, khee, psee, ksee and ee-ota," which I found kind of funny and fascinating. Of course, common convention beats out pedantic propriety and rightly so, I think. This sort of thought-provocation is quite valuable nonetheless, if for no other reason than to keep us aware of that about which we do not readily think.

When I saw the host and title I was concerned it may have been a rehashing of this urban legend - http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp

Relieved to see it was actually this article, which I've actually referenced a number of times in discussions with engineers to make myself sound like I know more than I actually do!

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Posted to mathoverflow: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/29070/is-defining-a-consta...

What about the fact that sin and cosine have such elegant Taylor series expansions if you use radians?

In radians, sin = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7!...

In 'Double radians', we have a 2^n factor in front of each term.

Even worse, in physics h-bar = h / (2 * pi).

I pronounced the new Pi as 'tipy' which is ironic, since it has three legs and is therefore NOT tippy....