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Sunset Shimmer, after gathering up her courage, decides to try and hit on the human world's Twilight. Little did she know that this simple action would spur the two of them into a fiery debate over a timeless question, one that humans and ponies alike have pondered for ages:
Which is better, pi or tau?
Written for Tau Day 2016.
EDIT: This… got featured? I… wow. Thank you all.
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I hate getting hit with pi. It never ends.
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/blog/2015/06/are-you-tau-ist-pi-day-under-attack
Ok this is real wtf.....
orig00.deviantart.net/fe86/f/2014/213/f/1/droppingthefrog_by_kayfedewa-d7t8q9f.gif
Nerds in love
i'm glad there wasn't too much math in this, i mean i'm only in algebra 2...
Ahh, you missed the obvious joke! Just one line, that's all it would take to have Fluttershy say, "Girls! Would you two please taun it down?"
When I saw this story in my feed I was expecting something to do with Warhammer, But, I learned something new today instead, so that's a bonus.
I'm...confused.
Entertained, yes, but confused. It's a fun story...but I have no idea what they were talking about. Though that may have been intentional.
7345675
Well, the author has pi on his face now.
Its arbitrary, I'd say, like most of the ships one can find.
I like it.
I'm with Sunset on this.
Tau is so much more convenient than pi. Even on the most basic level if you replace diameter x pi with radius x tau the equation for area of a circle becomes 1/2 x tau x radius^2 which is the perfect picture of the most basic integral imaginable. It gives clean clear cut examples of how we use advanced math without even realizing it when learning the lower levels.
A tad confusing but amusing.
7346383
Pi is right.
7347643
That is a lot of math I either forgot or never learned because of how advanced it is -- which kind of settles the point in my mind really. There's always going to be a place for pi. It's too big to ever concivably remove from math. It would be stupid to do so, but that doesn't mean ignoring the benefits of tau though. Like Sunset said it would be best to phase it in because it does clear things up. If anything, I find the claim to have less constants being better absurd. The Pi Manifesto claims tauists are singling out tau but that's just how these things work. It pointed out quite nicely there's significance to pi/2 and pi/4. There's no reason those ratios might not deserve their own constant too. It depends on the how and the why and the how often they're used. I mean, the majority of people think of pi as just 3.14. They don't appreciate the magnitude of pi. It's just a constant they sometimes use, and that is by far the biggest reason for tau. It's a label --- something practical for people who don't necessarily have the pure devotion to math that a mathematician would.
Well,they hurt my brain. I admit, I am bad at maths. I'd half forgotten what Pi even was and I've never heard of Tau in mathematical terms in my life.
"We just had a stupid argument."
"Let's date!"
"Okay!"
Good logic
The amount of happy I experienced just reading the title is impossible to describe. Now to read the story.
7347861 So you're RD in this story.
Sound about right or am I the only one.
7348678 Yeah pretty much, I'm usually more the "Twilight" one buuut when it comes to maths... not so much
Tau vult
Heretical Tau scum should burn in the holy anger of the God Emperor
7347861 I wasn't aware Pi vs. Tau was even a thing in the first place. When I searched for what exactly Tau was, I remembered we used it a lot more than Pi back in my high school, but that doesn't mean I understand it more than I do Pi. I suck at math, unfortunately.
7345501 I finished high school and I still have no idea what they're talking about, so no worries there.
Plot twist: the equestrian universe is made out of stable Tau matter.
Speaking as someone who uses algebraic forms in daily life for their day job and dabbles in geometry for fun and whose 8-year old daughter likes to play around with number sets, I have the following to say:
The whole agreement is reeeeeeeeeeeealy stupid.
Given that most people on the planet have trouble balancing their checkbook, which by its nature only operates on real numbers, just introducing variables into things is too complex, let alone imaginary or irrational numbers. Just for people to wrap their heads around the base concepts that make understanding something as simple as pi or tau requires so much effort that's outside their wheelhouse that you can forget about getting then to understand why either might be useful.
In the end they're both means by which you can come to the same conclusion. Sure, one might be more "elegant" while the other is more "classical," but at the end of the day, while mathematicians are busy getting into fistfights over nebulous numeric constructs, the rest of the world is busy having a life.
On the other hand, I will CUT you if you call "maths" instead of "math."
Tau Empire.
For the Greater Good.
I don't plan to read this, but I have to say, Pi is definitely the right one.
e^iPi + 1 = 0
It just gets more messy if you try and use Tau. Absolute proof Pi is the better of the two.
7361297 e^iTau=1
or if you really want to keep 0 in it:
e^iTau - 1 = 0
7364264 Okay, but then you are throwing away one of the awesome things about Euler's Identity. That it contains 1 in it.
e, i, pi, 1, 0
Five of the most spectacular constants in nature. You would replace 1 with -1, which is not nearly so nice.
WARNING: There be mathing down below!
This is the nerdiest shipfic I've ever read, and that's actually a category with some competition.
Taught me something, though!
Sunset and Twilight argue about nerd stuff.
Exposition bit in the middle could've been handled a bit better - such as having Twi and Sunset try to rope RD to their side. Works it into the narrative better than just Spike explaining it all on the sidelines.
This made me chuckle. Good job.
I'm personally fond of phi.
I side with Twilight. Mainly because I've gotten into a couple tau vs pi fights, and no one's been able to convince me that using the larger value is ever better!
This was sweet and so very hilarious. A fantastic story.
I wonder what their opinions on base 10 vs base 12 are? XD
I never heard of tau, so I'll have to look into it now. I really didn't quite get it, even though Spike explained it. But this was still a fun read regardless!
8375208
I honestly don't know what the advantage to base 10 is beyond 'it's working well enough' and 'it's what we've always used, so it would be a pain to switch to base 12'. Base 12 can do everything base 10 can and more. Also, base 10 isn't as universal as people treat it; so, I can't see any good reason to stick to that system as a society.
I actually favor using -1 in Euler's identity, because while it's beautiful enough as a Platonic ideal, I feel the best way to teach Euler's identity is to show its derivation, which helps make the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"-ish point about how much both developments in humanity's manipulation of numbers (the zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers...) and how much all the initially separate stuff we give students in math classes (arithmetic, ruler-and-compass geometry, basic algebra, trigonometry with calculators and identity memorization, integral calculus and deriving rather than defining pi, infinite series summation, replacement of the initial definition of logarithms with one based on integration and deriving rather than defining e, the hyperbolic functions...) finally come together as Euler's identity shows how both everything humanity and the student have studied has been just different views through a kaleidoscope on a very small set of relationship patterns. And using -1 seems to make the process just a bit more beautiful. (Note: this is a very small point on semantics, and I'll drop it unless we really want to recapture the spirit of this story in the comment section... on that note, below.)
Don't actually have an opinion on tau versus pi, but this story does a great job at capturing how that kind of argument goes: on the one hand really that freaking vehement because semantics (once the entire subject matter is the ability to clearly envision and communicate something there's nothing more important to be arguing about), on the other hand it looks way scarier for people on the outside (who aren't used to this) than it actually is because the parties involved know going into this they're not actually going to do more than gloriously argue right then and this isn't the kind of argument which actually affects friendships. While the romance angle's canonically optional this is otherwise the exact sort of thing which should happen at least once as soon as Sunset and Twilight are friends and regularly interacting.
I think Spike is a better source for exposition because he helps keep the others out of it: RD would either consider the whole thing utterly stupid and be trying to shut it down early or (if explained to her with just the wrong analogy, like which sports team is more fun for non-fans to watch play) could start a cycle of escalations which could actually shut down the slumber party, and Spike provides the most common extra perspective when this happens in a college center. There's usually somebody who understands what's going on, that it isn't going to end in a knife fight, and does the explaining. The people involved don't usually try to rope in extra people to test the "explanatory value" of their sides because the sample size is too small and the argument's more fun that resolving it anyway.
I'm sorry, but tau is what I use to symbolize torque. Lowercase pi is only used for that ratio.
One of the most adorably nerdy things I've ever read, and that's saying something. Thank you for it.
Well this didn't go according to plan.
Ok, now that explains why they're arguing.
Wow, didn't expected to hear that from fluttershy of all people.
Me neither and agreed.
Well looks like things worked out in the end, and the same with this story too.
I wonder how and where Sunset learned so much on tau. She doesn't seem to be the nerd type.
Can relate to yelling at a friend over math though. In tenth grade I had an overly passionate feud with a classmate over whether rational expressions are better than functions. It stopped after our math teacher introduced us to geometric series via rational function based on the wonderful children's book The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
The biggest argument for tau seems to be that all our circle related equations use the radius as a variable rather than diameter, and tau is radius-based.
Now I'm wondering why we use radians, not diametrans.
Why is it the radius of the unit circle that's equal to 1, not the diameter?
Perhaps in a universe with diameter-based circle-related equations, the conventional tau is being challenged by upstart pi...
NOT TWI BRINGING UP SUNSET MISCALCULATING IN THE FRIENDSHIP GAMES >:O