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How pi was almost 6.283185...

3Blue1Brown · Youtube · 30 HN points · 0 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention 3Blue1Brown's video "How pi was almost 6.283185...".
Youtube Summary
In some of his notes, Euler used π to represent 6.28... So why did we adopt 3.14...?
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Home page: https://www.3blue1brown.com

The idea for this video, as well as the live shots, came from Ben Hambrecht, with the writing and animating done by Grant Sanderson.

Special thanks to:
- University Library Basel, for letting us rummage through their historical collection
- Martin Mattmüller from the Bernoulli-Euler center for helpful discussion
- Michael Hartl, author of the Tau Manifesto, for pointing us to obscure references
- Library of the Institut de France

Cinematographer: Eugen Heller

Music by Vincent Rubinetti:
https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown

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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Sep 13, 2021 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by belter
Mar 14, 2018 · 29 points, 8 comments · submitted by zeristor
aylmao
Honestly should've been, Tau makes much more sense IMO (:
umanwizard
http://www.thepimanifesto.com/

In my opinion, the most natural definition of pi is "the area of the unit circle", which would be tau/2.

Armisael16
In my opinion, the most natural definition is the circumference of the unit circle, which is tau. The area of the unit circle is then simply the integral: tau/2*r^2.

Start at the lowest dimensional property (1D).

RickJWagner
Interesting! Articles like this make Hacker News stand out. Thanks, poster!
zeristor
A simple rule is to post all videos by 3Blue1Brown to HN
joezydeco
Read The Tau Manifesto!

https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto

ballenf
Kind of ironic that the video makes a compelling argument why such arguments are wastes of energy and miss the point.

For those who don't care to watch, the tl;dr is Euler used the constant symbol for pi similar to our use of theta, as a constant without a fixed value. Sometimes it was 3.14, sometimes 6.28 and sometimes pi/2, just depending on what problem he was solving and what form was most convenient.

The lesson being, don't get caught up wasting energy on the argument that could be used towards solving problems.

joezydeco
...don't get caught up wasting energy on the argument that could be used towards solving problems.

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