Pi: was Re: Guinness Book of Records??

[Jud McCranie]

At 10:15 PM 8/23/2002 -0400, Franklin T. Adams-Watters wrote:
>Actually, there's good reason to think pi is not the MOST FAMOUS 
>TRANSCEDENTAL CONSTANT OF *THE WHOLE COSMOS*.  It's only a historical 
>accident that we wound up with the ratio of the circumference to the 
>diameter.  It could just as easily have been 2*pi: the ratio of the 
>circumference to the radius.  And while the relationship is obviously 
>trivial, 2*pi is slightly more fundamental mathematically: it is the 
>period for sin and cos, among other things.

Once I tried to make a similar point on sci.math, and people didn't 
understand what I was saying.  Most constants are "fixed", but we could use 
2pi or pi/2 as the basic constant.  Some things would be easier with one of 
them, but they are fundamentally the same.


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|       Jud McCranie                                      |
|                                                         |
| Programming Achieved with Structure, Clarity, And Logic |
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