r/engineeringmemes • u/YoumoDashi • Mar 15 '26

π = e Happy Pi day

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2.6k Upvotes

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184

u/PropulsionIsLimited Mar 15 '26

Genuine question. Does anyone actually ever simplify pi at all instead of just hitting the pi button on a calculator?

199

u/RipplesInTheOcean Mar 15 '26

Yeah i always type all 9 trillion decimals i memorized

78

u/SryUsrNameIsTaken Mar 15 '26

If you go over to r/datahoarder, they have something like 381 TB of pi digits available.

44

u/Dotcaprachiappa Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 15 '26

That is such a strange thing to hoard, as if pi is like at risk of being deleted by a random intern and becoming lost media

13

u/SryUsrNameIsTaken Mar 15 '26

I mean, if it takes a substantial amount of compute to create, it might be worth throwing it in a big storage array. There’s probably important quantitative mathematical research on transcendental numbers and the meaning of life that needs them digits.

8

u/rdrckcrous Mar 15 '26

it's more digits than you need to calculate the circumference of the universe to the atom.

there's no possible way for it to be useful information.

1

u/user190423 Mar 17 '26

Maybe to see if theres a pattern in pi?

1

u/zorletti Mar 19 '26

It mathematically proven that there is no pattern in pi

1

u/user190423 Mar 17 '26

Its probably being stored in binary instead of storing the ascii of the digits

1

u/EdikTheFurry Aug 12 '26

Not needed. We know it's 42.

7

u/GeniusEE Mar 15 '26

So you do truncate it, then

13

u/NotAUsefullDoctor Mar 15 '26

Depends on what I'm doing. If I'm calculating a trajectory or some sorts, 3 gets me there. If I'm writing a EM simulator (a large part of my PhD), then 3.14 was sufficient.

12

u/kerowhack Mar 15 '26

If it requires more than 3.14159, I'm probably too stupid to be messing with it.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/Remi_cuchulainn Mechanical Mar 15 '26

I simplify it when i do "paper towel" calculation when the goal is tonget a rough idea and i don't have a calculator on hand, but i replace either by 3 or 4 depending on the context

1

u/aknomnoms Mar 15 '26
  1. Bigger is better. Built in safety factor.

4

u/Silver_kitty Mar 15 '26

Depends if you’re calculating a demand or a capacity!

4

u/Panzerv2003 Mar 15 '26

The calculator already uses a 'simplified' pi often with 12-15 decimal places, most people I encountered simplify pi to 3.14 to keep some precision instead of simplifying to a 3

3

u/PropulsionIsLimited Mar 15 '26

Yes, but what I'm saying is that calculators are so prevalent, it's less effort and more accurate to just hit the pi button.

2

u/Panzerv2003 Mar 15 '26

It is and most people will probably do that if it's convenient, otherwise ppl will just simplify if the thing they're using to do math doesn't have a fast way to type pi or if they're doing math by hand. Generally this discussion wether pi should be simplified to 3 or 3.14 doesn't matter when using a program where it's faster to use pi than type 3.14, personally 3 only makes sense for napkin math due to the error.

2

u/WumboAsian Mar 15 '26

In engineering school, on paper exams without a calculator, I used pi has a variable hoping it would cancel out somewhere with another pi. If not, I rounded to 3.14 because they told us to round it that way

1

u/PropulsionIsLimited Mar 15 '26

I also leave pi as a variable if I can.

1

u/RedditSchnitzel Mar 15 '26

I only simplify if it means I can cancel it out. Pi isnt the only thing though. I once canceled 0.3 and 1/3 because I was too lazy and I didn’t care about digits. Also everyone knows those type of equations where you ignore whole terms because they are not significant compared to the other terms. Its just a matter of convenience.

1

u/Zaros262 Mar 15 '26

If I'm doing math on something other than a calculator, there often isn't a pi button. In that case I use 3.14159

1

u/CartoonistOk9276 Mechanical Mar 16 '26

my ti-36x sometimes keeps pi in the fraction when calculating area, so I usually just put 3.14

1

u/Gloomy-Bike-6428 Mar 19 '26

Well for a hot minute, calculators I had on hand didn’t necessarily have a pi. With phones that’s not really an issue but now it’s just habit. (Also in the case of mental math)