There’s a lot of weird stereotypes out there that make no sense. Like the whole “programmers wear thigh high socks” thing. Where did that even come from?
Comment on Virgin Physicists
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 18 hours agoNever, 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.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 16 hours ago
BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Bet that one was started by all those dastardly programmers that wear knee high socks!
bus_factor@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
There’s less and less reason to do it (and it’s never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to do 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 justxfor a sufficiently smallx.mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
you’ve never seen anybody simplify it to 3 when doing head calcs without a phone nearby?
it doesn’t happen often, in fact I’ve seen it once. in a decade.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The only time you should be doing head calcs as an engineer is to double check that you have a reasonable answer with the actual calcs on your actual calculator.
qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 16 hours ago
For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).
The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.