The Pi You Know Is A Lie (opens in new tab)

Is scribd an improvement for windows users or something? It seems that for most people here it's an anoyance and a worse user experience than just linking to the pdf. Does it solve some problem I'm missing?

edit: Try zooming all the way in. You're in for some hideously unreadable fuzzy font rendering... why oh why.

I don't see why this is such a big deal. Scaling by a factor of 2 doesn't make any of the math lose it's beauty. The underlying math is still the same. Calling 30 minutes "an hour" doesn't make time go faster. It's all semantics, really.

Anyway, pi is so engrained in our mathematics that the costs of switching would surely be higher than any superficial, aesthetic benefits.

I independently 'discovered' this a few years back, basically on the grounds that there are infinitely many shapes with constant diameter but only one (the circle) with constant radius. It stands to reason that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter contains a spurious factor of 2; it must be that the ratio of circumference to radius is the more fundamental quantity.

This discovery was almost enough to make me want to memorize an embarrassing number of digits of 2π; 6.28 is really pathetic. (What's embarrassing, you say? Try 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399...)

PDF: http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf

Holy... Eliezer Yudkowsky? Why, hello...!

That's interesting.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread here, but the non-standard scrolling in Scribd bugs me. When I use two-finger drag on the macbook pro to scroll, scribd just doesn't move like a normal page.

Yeah man. I love this paper. All of the equations look so much prettier without 2 in front of pi everywhere.

Indiana once tried to pass a law saying pi actually equals 3.2

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html

Volume of the n-ball?

Generally, what I would consider the defining equation for pi. Has no factor of 2?

V_n = pi^(n/2)R^n / Gamma(n/2+1) = C_n R^n

C_n = pi^k/k! for even n=2k

C_n = 2^(k+1)k!pi^k / (2k+1)! for odd n=2k+1

Of course we could just change the definition of gamma, but I prefer gamma as an extension of factorial.

Almost as bad as negatively charged electrons.

From the article: The proper value, which does deserve all of the reverence and adulation bestowed upon the current imposter, is the number now unfortunately known as 2pi.

Does this mean we can have 2pi day on Jun 28?