Welcome to the Tau Manifesto. This manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice of circle constant is
—but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article “
When I first started reading this site, I had assumed that it was a crackpot rant, but it’s actually a very well-reasoned and -presented argument for an alternative to as the “circle constant." Read on for details, although the image above is a big spoiler. ;-p
P.S. This debuted last Monday (6/28), offered by the author as Tau Day as a counterpart to Pi Day.
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