this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 5 days ago (15 children)

Welcome to the field of engineering! Your first lesson will be; "Tolerances and you"!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 days ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Never, in any engineering field, have I EVER seen anyone simplify pi to 5. For that matter, I have never seen anyone simplify to 3. It is always 3.14. I feel like pi simplification is a weird meme that people think engineers do but is never practiced anywhere.

It's like if there was a meme about chefs saying they always replace eggs with grapefruit. No they don't, and it's nonsense to think they do.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There's less and less reason to do it (and it's never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to round it a bit, but only if the specific thing you're doing allows it, and even then you're more likely to do a fixed-point approach by using e.g. 314 and dividing by 100 later, or adjusting that value a bit so you can divide by 128 via bitshift if you're on a chip where division is expensive. However, in 2025 you almost certainly should have picked a chip with an FPU if you're doing trigonometry.

And while rounding pi to 3 or 4 is certainly just a meme, there are other approximations which are used, like small-angle approximations, where things like sin(x) can be simplified to just x for a sufficiently small x.

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