Pi: was Re: Guinness Book of Records??

[Jud McCranie]

At 09:52 PM 8/24/2002 -0700, Henry Gould wrote:
>The most important constant in the entire known Universe is the number 1 ...

I need to clarify what I meant, then that'll be the end for me.  The point 
that I had tried to make on sci.math was that we could use 2pi or pi/2 for 
the constant, not that it was the most important.


> > 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.


To which I replied:

> >
> > 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.



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