I don't remember if it was like ACT or whatever. I took it and I did terrible. I went to a class and they told me not to read the reading section, but just skim through it and grab key words. The the next time I did the test I did a pretty good job for my dumb arsre.
If anyone is curious, I looked it up and The Guinness Book of World Records currently recognizes Rajveer Meena as the world record holder for Pi memorization. He recited 70'000 digits of Pi while blindfolded in about ten hours in 2015. I can't even begin to understand how someone could actually do that.
I memorized 100 digits some years ago using physical memory. I would type the digits of pi on the numpad and memorize the movements of my hand, how it feels and which button goes when by position. Then when I would have to recite it, I'd imagine a numpad, move my hand and just say the number that corresponds to the imaginary button I'm pressing.
Don't know if that could work for 70k digits though
Savant
Practice
Now I want to see the original letter. For some reason this reminds me of David Thorne (27bslash6)
This beats the approximations used in ancient Sumer (3.1065) and China (3). Try contacting their respective records bodies.
Gotta say, using 3 just feels like giving up due to laziness, even in 1200BC.
Also it's interesting how the Chinese entries basically stop between 1400 and 1949, whereas European names are far more present during this era. Some Japanese ones, too. I wonder how comprehensive this page is.
Rounding pi to 3 is just the engineering way. It's close enough to get the job done and then I don't have to worry about decimal places. However, using pi=3 typically undershoots your calculations, so personally I like to use pi=4
I finally found you, an engineer actually using π=3 (or 4 as you say), and not just people making fun of it.
I am also an engineer, but I'm going to wager much more recently graduated (worked 3.5 years).
Who hurt you?
Like, I get it, in a world before calculators, but there's a button on the calculator, in your spreadsheet, in whatever program that approximates pi to many, many, many digits.
Putting in a design/safety margins into pi seems like a strange choice.
Sincerely, an engineer looking for answers on this π=3 meme.
Even if it's back of the napkin first past approximation. You have a phone calculator. Please use it for our collective peace haha
(All jibes in jest, I'm genuinely curious)
Only 7 years of engineering experience and pretty much every time I have used pi, I have rounded it to 3 or 4. Now, the thing is, I am an electrical engineer that works in industrial automation. I never use pi at all
Thanks for the response! Still, why would you do this, and not just use pi?
I'm not following what the purpose of rounding pi is
PI() is the function a spreadsheet, if that helps ;)
Please give me peace haha
An error margin of less than 5% (even better, biased in a known direction) is more than good enough for plenty of use cases.
An error margin of more than 25% on the other hand, is seldom acceptable.
One is an error margin, the other a factor of safety!
Nah, it's fine. Trust me I use pi=4 in every calculation I do that uses pi and I haven't ever run into any issues at all
(I'm not that type of engineer, I never do anything with pi)
It's called safety factor
Sometimes zero decimals is enough precision even in 2025…
…but also because of laziness…
Doesn't have the famous
ln(640320³ + 744)/√163
for some reason. Accurate to 14 decimal places I believe which is more accurate than what you need for 99.9% of its applications.
So to avoid memorizing a 15-digit number you'll memorize a 13-digit equation?
More like you memorize that to show off. There are tons of high schoolers that know pi to dozens of digits, it’s not really exciting. But most high schoolers fundamentally don’t understand logs.
It's been said that with 15 decimals, you can calculate the circumference on the observable universe with a precision of the width of an atom.
Not quite, according to JPL https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/
15 decimal places, for Voyager 1 - We have a circle more than 94 billion miles (more than 150 billion kilometers) around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by no more than the width of your little finger.
This is an exaggeration.
The universe's radius is around 46.5 billion light years (around 4.4 * 10^26 meters), the error introduced of using 15 decimals of pi is around the order of 10^-16. Thus the error of calculating the circumference would be in the order of
8.8*10^26 * 10^-16 = 8.8*10^10 meters
14 decimal places is more accuracy than you'd ever need.
Consider the size of what you're measuring.
I'm American so you're getting SAE units, deal with it.
If we have a radius of 1", the circumference of my object is 6.283185 or so inches around. Maybe it's 6.283186. the difference between those two numbers is one one hundred thousandths of an inch. About 25 nanometers. Half the size of the smallest bacterium we've ever discovered.
That is with 6 decimal places. With 8 you can measure a circumference with an accuracy to the single atom. Any smaller than that, and you start charging the result by measuring it at all.
I like how the filename is "NoFair.webp". Hiding a funny little message in the filename is classy.
This isn't really a meme
Pi is exactly 3!
so 6?
Tau
Three, no more, no less. Three is the number of pi. Four should not be pi, neither two. Five is right out.
I got into a long debate with someone who wouldn't accept my claim that pi is 3.
My reasoning was that 3 is accurate to the number of decimal places it's quoted to, which is all you ever can say of any given value of pi. Like, pi might not be exactly 3, but it's not 3.14159265358979323846 either, because both values still have infinity digits missing.
1, 2, 5!
3 sir!
Oh yes! 3!
3.1 I hold the world record for memorizing the shortest length of pi decimals.
This guy engineers
_
I win!
Does anyone else really want to write them now just to get an official rejection letter?
If I write them enough and get enough rejection letters, can I then get accepted as the Guinness World Records record holder for most rejections of Guinness World Record records?
Is there a Guiness world record for classes or categories of individuals with the most rejection letters from the Guiness World Records association?
If you pay for it I'm sure they would gladly add it
3.11
You could say he was all mixed up, and he didn’t know what (else) to do.
He bet on himself though
Pi for workgroups.
Every 5y/o is better at copying the Guinness World Records logo.
I hold 2 GWR for the Reddit Secret Santa.
Anyone that participated during a couple years qualified.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment