A new PI?

I just found this and thought I share it:

'PI is Wrong!'
www.math.utah.edu...

Whereas the title of his doc/opinion is a bad choose (PI is not wrong!) I share his opinion a little. It had been better we had created a constant with the value of 2*PI and used this instead PI. It had simplified the things.

But I guess it is like it is and a change would lead to chaos.

Interesting thought and that's why this catched my eyes at first hand, that some years back I read about a prohpecy (I believe one of that many nostradamus interpretations) that it will be figured out that PI is wrong. Well again, PI it is not wrong and I believe that was more meant as a symbolic prohpecy that something with the sience went the wrong way. But now that title is a funny coincidence.

I agree with the article. As a physicist I can really see where he is coming from, 2pi is much more common in formulae than pi alone. He presents some examples on the second page.

Unfortunately I cant see the situation changin any time soon!

Actually, I like pi as it is. a lot of the things we do in physics and especially things that deal with oscillations often use a pi phase shift which is more conveinient than 1/2 pi. Considering that nearly everything in the universe is some kind of oscillation/ combination of sine waves this works well... Although I guess I'm arguing a nonexistant point..... wait scratch that. frequenchy being 2pi/omega alone definately justifies making the switch to pi = 6.283...

I think he's wrong. I think an irrational transcendental number like pi should be simplified as much as it can be, even if you usually then would have to multiply it by 2 in use.

Plus the Euler's formula he gave would be misleading, since the square root of 1 is both -1 and 1. The correct answer is only -1. Therefore, in his scheme, pi could actually be zero in that formula.

Doesn't work.

[edit on 4/13/2007 by djohnsto77]