PCWorld Forums: Tau Day: An Even More Fundamental Holiday Than Pi Day - PCWorld Forums

Post your comments for Tau Day: An Even More Fundamental Holiday Than Pi Day here

Tau = Tau is... a tautology

We can eat pie on the pie day, but what are we gonna eat on the Tau day ... that's one big problem

RummanWaqary7tx, on 28 June 2011 - 03:28 PM, said:

According to Google Images: we may not get to eat pie, but we do get pretty sweet mechs (http://kofler.dot.at...Battlesuits.gif).

Sebastianialq, on 28 June 2011 - 02:44 PM, said:

But iTaut(iTau) = a(Puddytat).

Perhaps tau is a better choice of constant than pi, but if the mathematicians really want to correct a glaring mistake, they need to revise linear algebra such that the indices of rows and columns start at zero rather than one.

StephenPopeird3, on 02 July 2011 - 12:40 PM, said:

I agree, because everybody starts counting "zero, one, two." I think the software engineers are wrong on this one, and just because we build ordinals from {} doesn't convince me otherwise. A 1x1 matrix can have 1 and has elements in the first position in each direction....

(In all seriousness, I think there are some examples from software engineering that quite illuminate the issue. The zero-based representation is quite handy when you want to do things like slice a string. Substring(x, 0, 1) gives you the first character. The zero-based ordinals fall between the actual elements. This is quite handy, but still argues for one-based indices when you are trying to describe the elements themselves.)

RummanWaqary7tx, on 28 June 2011 - 03:28 PM, said:

I would think that is obvious: two pies... :-)