*reads over a few times before the paragraph clicks* I hadn't thought of that. I wonder if there is another way I could give pi extreme importance...

I wonder if there is another way I could give pi extreme importance...

*melts* I. Don't. Understand. This. AT ALL!!! *makes mental note to steer clear of this thread in order to keep from having a mental break-down*

* was confused *

* still is, for that matter *



What I thought you meant before was that your culture's system for interpreting and manipulating mathematics was what you were saying was different. Which system is easily changed. * smiles *

Here's an idea; I'm not sure how this would work, but I'm fairly sure it could. In one of the accounts I heard or read of "the birth of mathematics" in the Euclidean school, squares (and area as sums of "unit squares") were seen as fundamental because they were working on a floor paved with square tiles. In another world, with utterly different mindsets, unit circles might become the fundamental building block of the most basic geometry, so that the thing you think first to do if you have a lenth is not to draw a square with sides of that length, but to draw a circle twice that length across.
Oh, and another thought from those very early readings (so long ago ...) occurs to me: I'd suggest looking into early Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, which were very different, and I think were supplanted by the Greek model primarily because (aside from Alexander's conquests and such, which we might call "an accident of history") the Greek model was better at making new mathematical discoveries using its existing ideas as tools, while other cultures' understandings were aimed at solving particular problems.

*melts* I. Don't. Understand. This. AT ALL!!! *makes mental note to steer clear of this thread in order to keep from having a mental break-down*

That is exactly the kind of thing I was aiming for.
*nods* The numeric system of the Babylonians (or was it Assyrians? *can't remember*) crossed my mind briefly when I was thinking of this. I believe their counting was based on the number sixty instead of ten.

Without thinking through it at all, that sounds like it would work well for my purposes also (perhaps the race divides circles into six wedges as a kind of sub-shape -- our 45-45-90 triangle is to our square as these wedges would be to their circle).

Awww. Math can be so much fun...

You're thinking of the Babylonians; I don't think they counted in base sixty, but that and twelve were their preferred bases for calculating ratios (fractions) of things, as that makes calculations involving simple fractions easier---which is, if I'm not mistaken, why our society divides days into twenty-four hours, hours into sixty minutes, and so on.
The Egyptians, I think I remember, had a way of calculating the area of a field (or maybe how much water it would need, or something) that a modern mathematiian could only have drived using integral calculus, and similarly "advanced" techniques related to their building projects---but, as I said, they didn't generalize these or apply them to less-pressing problems.

Sort of like in the proof (if I remember correctly) of the correctness of the formula for the volume of a sphere?

I don't think I'm familiar with that proof... (Come to think of it, I'm not familiar with any proofs. Geometry was three-to-four years ago. )

My thinking through common equations as if pi was equal to one -- and subsequently thinking about the cultures that might use that -- was brought up in another thread, and is being brought here in order to stop derailing the aforementioned thread.

So... I think I explained it (either that or I did an awful job of explaining it and/or I've been accidentally using wrong terms). By making pi the basis for a common math problem: 2pi * r becomes 2r/pi. In order to make this make sense for a culture, I've surmised that 1/pi would be an irrational number (an "anti-pi") the people use on a common basis in their math.

On the other hand, I could be doing the math wrong.

It is like asking "what if 2 were equal to 1?"