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wnoise comments on On Pi day, we eat pie; On Tau day, we eat Taoists? - Less Wrong Discussion

3 [deleted] 15 March 2011 01:43AM

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Comment author: wnoise 17 March 2011 06:22:38PM 1 point [-]

Bah. If you want to alter it for convenience reasons, then π/2 is much nicer as it gets rid of more fractions, and a quarter turn is a pretty natural unit.

But actually I prefer keeping π as it is. The relation between the half-integral values of the Γ function and π (which shows up in many integral) is rather nice. And despite 2π appearing nicer for circles, when you generalize to n-spheres, it's clear that π is more useful with the surface area of formula 2 π^(n/2) / Γ(n/2) and volume of π^(n/2) / Γ(n/2 + 1).