This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits.
I know that 22/7 is an extremely good approximation for pi, since it’s written with 3 digits, but is accurate to almost 4 digits. Another good one is √10, which is accurate to a little over 2 digits.
I’ve heard that ‘field engineers’ used to use these approximations to save time when doing math by hand. But what field, exactly? Can anyone give examples of fields that use fewer than 16 digits? In the spirit of something like xkcd: Purity, could you rank different sciences by how many digits of pi they require?
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I’m a waitress, and pie is $12.50.
Damn that’s pricey
I’m a liar and I use all the digits of pi.
Well you’re honest about being a liar so there’s that I guess. I on the other hand only speaks the truth and I use all the digits of pi, honestly I do.
There are two guards: one speaks only the truth and the other only lies. But both know the infinite digits of pi and are underemployed as guards who never get to use that knowledge.
I haven’t typed the digits of pi for probably 20 years because it’s defined as a double precision float in all the programming libraries I use.
I work in healthcare and I’ve yet to use even a single digit of pi
Retail, and to my knowledge among all my coworkers we have used zero digits of pi.
When I code in C++ I use 15 digits of pi after the decimal point (double float) but I have only rarely coded for money and have never used pi for those work products, so again, zero digits on the clock.
Ditto for restaurant work, although 2 decimal points would be more than enough if I needed the volume of a cake or other round food.
I’m a consultant and I use whatever Android calculator gives me
I’m an auditor. Zero digits is the norm if I have to use Pi there is something VERY wrong
I’m a programmer and I remember 33 digits, but in practice I never use pi because I never have to deal with geometry
Software Engineering. 16 sigfigs across 64 bits
If anyone here wants a fun way to memorize more digits, enjoy this song!
Really glad I have a legit reason to share this old thing
Mechatronics student. If your not using 3.1416 at a minimum, then your doing it wrong.
you’re
Answering my own question: I work in web development and my usual value for pi is the standard JavaScript Math.PI. JavaScript uses 64-bit floats, which are accurate to about 15 decimal places. But that’s how many digits the computer uses. For practical math, I don’t think I’ve ever needed more than 2 digits of accuracy in an equation involving pi.
Equipment engineering. Usually 2 if I’m doing math by hand. 5 for more accurate calculations.
Back in middle school I memorized this much of pi (for no good reason):
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
That’s far more accurate than I’ll ever need.
This probably won’t play well with this audience, but I’m a management/strategy consultant. “~5” (technically one decimal place but also rounded to the nearest interval of 5) for any C-level decks ;)
That’s a crime 😭
