Tau Day is June 28th, Since Pi Day is So Mainstream

The only thing geekier than geeky things in general is geeky disagreements about geeky things.

And as far as geek-fights go, this one is pretty geeky. Pi Day is celebrated March 14th, the date that numerically matches up with the mathematical constant, 3.14. However, not long after math nerds the country over began celebrating Pi Day, another faction of mathletes cropped up looking to supplant it with Tau Day on its corresponding number date- June 28th, or 6.28.

Not surprisingly, the debate isn’t all super-friendly, per CNN:

This idea of celebrating Tau is now at least 10 years old, having cropped up in a 2001 essay by Bob Palais called “Pi is wrong!”

But it exploded on the Internet last Tau Day — June 28 (6/28) — when Michael Hartl launched the Tau Manifesto, a lengthy treatise about why pi is confusing and should be replaced with tau.

The news network also point/counterpoints Hartl and another math dude who are all “come at me, bro” about Pi Day versus Tau Day:

“There definitely are some people who have trouble with the notation,” says Hartl, a physicist and entrepreneur. “I would eventually like to see that the mathematical powers that be acknowledge the problem.”

And what do the powers that be say? There is a sense that 2 times pi — or what Hartl calls “tau” — is important, but it’s still a multiple of pi, which is a fundamental constant of mathematics, Ivars Peterson, director of publications and communications at the Mathematical Association of America, told me in March.

A multiple of Pi. Boo-yah, Tau Day fans! Do you celebrate either of the mathematical holidays- or maybe another, more obscure math day? Are you having a party in your mom’s basement this year in honor of it with your WoW guild?

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