This beats the approximations used in ancient Sumer (3.1065) and China (3). Try contacting their respective records bodies.
Gotta say, using 3 just feels like giving up due to laziness, even in 1200BC.
Also it’s interesting how the Chinese entries basically stop between 1400 and 1949, whereas European names are far more present during this era. Some Japanese ones, too. I wonder how comprehensive this page is.
Rounding pi to 3 is just the engineering way. It’s close enough to get the job done and then I don’t have to worry about decimal places. However, using pi=3 typically undershoots your calculations, so personally I like to use pi=4
An error margin of less than 5% (even better, biased in a known direction) is more than good enough for plenty of use cases.
An error margin of more than 25% on the other hand, is seldom acceptable.
I finally found you, an engineer actually using π=3 (or 4 as you say), and not just people making fun of it.
I am also an engineer, but I’m going to wager much more recently graduated (worked 3.5 years).
Who hurt you?
Like, I get it, in a world before calculators, but there’s a button on the calculator, in your spreadsheet, in whatever program that approximates pi to many, many, many digits.
Putting in a design/safety margins into pi seems like a strange choice.
Sincerely, an engineer looking for answers on this π=3 meme.
Even if it’s back of the napkin first past approximation. You have a phone calculator. Please use it for our collective peace haha
(All jibes in jest, I’m genuinely curious)
Only 7 years of engineering experience and pretty much every time I have used pi, I have rounded it to 3 or 4. Now, the thing is, I am an electrical engineer that works in industrial automation. I never use pi at all
Thanks for the response! Still, why would you do this, and not just use pi?
I’m not following what the purpose of rounding pi is
PI() is the function a spreadsheet, if that helps ;)
Please give me peace haha
Doesn’t have the famous
ln(640320³ + 744)/√163for some reason. Accurate to 14 decimal places I believe which is more accurate than what you need for 99.9% of its applications.
It’s been said that with 15 decimals, you can calculate the circumference on the observable universe with a precision of the width of an atom.
Not quite, according to JPL https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/
15 decimal places, for Voyager 1 - We have a circle more than 94 billion miles (more than 150 billion kilometers) around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by no more than the width of your little finger.
If anyone is curious, I looked it up and The Guinness Book of World Records currently recognizes Rajveer Meena as the world record holder for Pi memorization. He recited 70’000 digits of Pi while blindfolded in about ten hours in 2015. I can’t even begin to understand how someone could actually do that.
Savant
I memorized 100 digits some years ago using physical memory. I would type the digits of pi on the numpad and memorize the movements of my hand, how it feels and which button goes when by position. Then when I would have to recite it, I’d imagine a numpad, move my hand and just say the number that corresponds to the imaginary button I’m pressing.
Don’t know if that could work for 70k digits though
I don’t remember if it was like ACT or whatever. I took it and I did terrible. I went to a class and they told me not to read the reading section, but just skim through it and grab key words. The the next time I did the test I did a pretty good job for my dumb arsre.
3.1 I hold the world record for memorizing the shortest length of pi decimals.
- Eat it.
During lockdown I had a bit of time on my hands so I memorised all the digits of pi in the right order.
right order
descending primes, right?
Decimal expansion. 3.14 etc
am I missing a bad joke here?
