Asklemmy

43965 readers

1975 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

126

What field do you work in, and how many digits of pi do you use? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 8 months ago by nycki to c/[email protected]

123 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well, I have two answers. If it is mental math I use 3.1 and round up. If I am calculating something I care about I use my TI-86 which has pi to 14 digits.

Practically speaking, I don't often need to convert diameter to circumference but I do occasionally need to calculate area or volume and in those cases I have way more error in other measurements or assumptions (2 or 3 digits) so 5 digits of pi is more than enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So you round up 3.1 to 3.2?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

No I round the result to compensate for the error.