I am still confused. Please give an example, where the proposed notation is noticeably more succinct than the traditional notation. It seems to me that your symbol really just means "2 pi". If you had a symbol that meant "2 pi", you could use it and save writing a "2" sometimes, but a lot of the time it would be folded into a coefficient and there would be no simplification. This makes me think I just haven't gotten the idea yet. On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
RWG writes:
<< I don't like the circled dot. Isn't it already astro***ical for Sun? How about a circular little arrow. Then we'd have a cw and ccw sign option, and maybe even fractional turn and phase variations via lightface or dotted segments.
Makes sense. But the likelihood of a symbol's being used is inversely proportional to the amount of writing it requires.*
So maybe letting that circular arrow evolve naturally, it would become something like an upper semicircle with a short vertical stroke on its left or on its right . . .?
Alternatively, a sideways 6 vs. a sideways 9 might work.
* * *
As for *why* anyone would want such a symbol: In some research I'm doing, for a long time I've been writing fractions of a circle in radians and finally got tired of writing all those pis when only which fraction of a circle -- not its arclength -- is relevant.
--Dan ____________________________________________________________________ * This is the *real* reason that more numbers start with 1 than with other digits, pace Benford's Law.
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