I have yet to hear of any actual mathematicians who spend effort on this stuff. It's a bit like arguing that the word "circle" would be better spelled "surkle": it's probably true, but it's a very surface-level thing that stops mattering after ten minutes of familiarity. I'm quite sure that the distinction between pi and 2*pi has not been hindering any progress in mathematics.
The article also makes the absolutely ridiculous suggestion that our use of pi instead of 2*pi could put us at some meaningful disadvantage in the eyes of hypothetical intelligence elsewhere in the universe. First of all, if we live in a universe where these superficial details are so crucial, obviously we would first need to abandon the base-ten numeral system, which is completely arbitrary, in favor of probably base two, or at least something else that can be justified mathematically. And the biggest irony here is that in base two, the distinction between pi and 2*pi is completely trivial, it's just a shift left or right by one place.
I have yet to hear of any actual mathematicians who spend effort on this stuff. It's a bit like arguing that the word "circle" would be better spelled "surkle": it's probably true, but it's a very surface-level thing that stops mattering after ten minutes of familiarity. I'm quite sure that the distinction between pi and 2*pi has not been hindering any progress in mathematics.
The article also makes the absolutely ridiculous suggestion that our use of pi instead of 2*pi could put us at some meaningful disadvantage in the eyes of hypothetical intelligence elsewhere in the universe. First of all, if we live in a universe where these superficial details are so crucial, obviously we would first need to abandon the base-ten numeral system, which is completely arbitrary, in favor of probably base two, or at least something else that can be justified mathematically. And the biggest irony here is that in base two, the distinction between pi and 2*pi is completely trivial, it's just a shift left or right by one place.
Can we meaningfully call it ‘abandoning’ when practically we’d still keep it, only twice?