Pi Day 2015: meet the man who invented Pi
Another brilliant Welshman
In 1706, William Jones – a self-taught mathematician and one of Anglesey’s most famous sons – published his seminal work, Synopsis palmariorum matheseos, roughly translated as A summary of achievements in mathematics.
It is a work of great historical interest because it is where the symbol π appears for the first time in scientific literature to denote the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Jones realised that the decimal 3.141592 … never ends and that it cannot be expressed precisely. “The exact proportion between the diameter and the circumference can never be expressed in numbers,” he wrote. That was why he recognised that it needed its own symbol to represent it.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/mar/14/pi-day-2015-william-jones-the-welshman-who-invented-pi?CMP=fb_gu
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since the radius is sufficient to specify a circle, tau does make more sense, but pi is too ingrained in the culture of mathematics to give way anytime soon, IMHO.
That's because when distance is considered, it is universally a radius.
I have sympathy for the tau argument, but I think that pi is so engrained in the culture that it will likely remain.
Who was the other one?
just for starters
