Thanks Rick,
That's why I brought it up here, to get unofficial feedback!
As a matter of credit- the suggested \newpi symbol was not mine but
due to Richard Palais (mathematical adviser of Leslie Lamport (LaTeX)
and Mike Spivak (AMSTeX/Joy of TeX) at Brandeis). In \TeX :
\def \newpi{{\pi\mskip -7.8 mu \pi}}
suffices. My only suggestion was that Unicode offer its users a
single symbol for one of the fundamental constants of math and
natural science, the circumference of the unit circle, 6.28...
Most people think \pi seem to think \pi was an ancient Greek invention.
The historical accident of 3.14... is described in the article, and dates
to the 1700's - the Euler chose to simplify Periphery/Diameter, in their
Greek spellings, \pi \over \delta rather than the competing
Periphery/Radius, or \pi \over \rho
Bob
On Wed, 16 Jan
2002, Rick McGowan wrote:
> Robert Palais wrote:
>
> > Nelson Beebe recommended it since he figured unicode 3.2 would be
> > the make or break for "getting it in use".
>
> Speaking not officially, but as someone who has been lurking around here
> awhile, the Unicode Technical Committee does not generally float trial
> balloons. In other words, UTC doesn't look around for graphical symbols
> which, on a theoretical basis might be "nice" or even "useful to someone",
> and then encode them in the hope that they will become widely used. UTC
> looks around for symbols that are in wide enough use to warrant being
> encoded.
>
> If this symbol starts showing up widely instead of "2 pi" in mainstream
> high school math text books, then UTC will know it's time to encode it.
> Until then, it's a curiosity.
>
> Rick
>
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