As the title says, Tau Day (6/28) is once again upon us, though I forgot about it until my phone reminded me this morning. Tau, if you don't know or have forgotten, is simply the irrational, transcendental ratio of a circle's circumference, C, to its radius, r, or twice the value of pi:
\[\tau=\frac{C}{r}=2\pi=6.283185\dots\]
As detailed in The Tau Manifesto, there are a huge number of reasons that using tau makes so much more sense than using pi. Using pi instead of tau for angular measure is like measuring time on Earth in six-month periods rather than years; both ignore a natural and convenient measure of cyclicity. (You can read the original parable where this is explained in much better detail here.)
This year's State of the Tau continues to collect various sightings or milestones for tau over the past \(e^{i\tau}\cdot365\) days. One thing that stood out to me was that tau has been added as a constant to Java, which is up there in the top three most popular languages last I checked. (It's been in Python, the currently-most-popular language, for several years now.) Slowly but surely, it seems like people are catching on to the fact that math (trigonometry in particular) can be so much easier and more intuitive with a little change in units. Let's hope for a good year to come for tau! A hui hou!
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