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

submitted 8 months ago by nycki@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] Asidonhopo@lemmy.world 20 points 8 months ago

Retail, and to my knowledge among all my coworkers we have used zero digits of pi.

When I code in C++ I use 15 digits of pi after the decimal point (double float) but I have only rarely coded for money and have never used pi for those work products, so again, zero digits on the clock.

Ditto for restaurant work, although 2 decimal points would be more than enough if I needed the volume of a cake or other round food.