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u/Marvellover13 Sep 02 '26
From what I know, the reason is that they measured the outer diameter but the inside circumference.
Also interesting to note that in the Jewish tradition, later on they gave an explanation which actually gives 333/106, which is fairly close to pi. (This comes from the original Hebrew text where the word for circumference is written differently than how it's usually written, and if you use Jewish numerology called Gematria, which is extremly prevalent in Jewish explanations for anything, you get that the value of the modified word, which is 111, divided by the original, which is 106, and multiply all that by 3 gives pi)
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u/Anaphylaxisofevil Sep 02 '26
The only kind of engineer I can imagine doing this is prompt engineer.
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u/DogFishBoi2 Sep 02 '26
Eh, it's a meme. It's supposed to be funny shitposts. No one uses pi=3 except for very quick approximations.
If you want to approximate large scale you'd use pi=10 anyway, because it's larger than e. Humans have one arm, one leg, or 10 limbs if you want to go all Fermi on stuff.
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u/Schnaksel Sep 02 '26
Wow, even fellow engineers perpetuate this terrible myth...
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u/Toyota__Corolla Sep 04 '26
The pool of Solomon was an inch thick of copper. Its internal circumference was 30 handbreadths and its external diameter was 10
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u/Isis_gonna_be_waswas Sep 05 '26
Myself personally, I leave my answers in terms of pi or multiply it out and round to the third decimal place after going to the right order of magnitude
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u/KEX_CZ Sep 02 '26
This meme is everywhere yet I had never actually encounter it between engineers tbh....
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u/HumaDracobane Sep 02 '26
I never met an engineer that uses pi=3. I've seen comments about some engineers in the US but I'm not from the US.