What's the deal with Euler's identity?

(lcamtuf.substack.com)

13 points | by surprisetalk 5 days ago

2 comments

  • rmunn 1 hour ago
    Personally, I prefer the version with tau (2 times pi) in it rather than the one with pi:

    e^(i*tau) = 1

    I won't reproduce https://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto here, but I'll just mention one part of it. I very much prefer doing radian math using tau rather than pi: tau/4 radians is just one-fourth of a "turn", one-fourth of the way around the circle, i.e. 90°. Which is a lot easier to remember than pi/2, and would have made high-school trig so much easier for me. (I never had trouble with radians, and even so I would have had a much easier time grasping them had I been taught them using tau rather than pi as the key value).

    • snthpy 5 minutes ago
      This!

      I've been posting the manifesto to friends and colleagues every tau day for the past ten years. Let's keep chipping away at it and eventually we won't obfuscate radians for our kids anymore.

      Friends don't let friends use pi!

    • badlibrarian 1 hour ago
      Which would be e^(i*tau) - 1 = 0 if you wanted to honor the spirit of the Identity.
  • xeonmc 1 hour ago
    Never liked that form of the Euler's formula. I prefer the following:

        (-1)ˣ = cos(πx) + i sin(πx)
    • badlibrarian 1 hour ago
      That's not the point of the Identity. You exponentiated the beauty right out of it.
      • xeonmc 39 minutes ago
        Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

        Instead shoehorning it into an arbitrary symbol salad by gimping its generality, I prefer the one which makes a statement: "What does it mean to apply inversion partially?"