Even in engineering it is common to just round pi to 3 and quickly estimate whatever it is your doing.
In astronomy, pi=1 or 10, depending on whether you’re trying to over or under estimate something. Because when you’re trying to estimate distances measured in millions of light years, the difference between 3 and 10 is just one or two orders of magnitude on a small number. It’s pretty common for astronomers to do napkin math by rounding every single number to the nearest zero. 91k becomes 100k for instance. Because the napkin math estimations are just trying to gauge whether some celestial event or object is a thousand light years away, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, etc… And pi becomes 10, because that’s the nearest round number.
Excuse me what? I’ve been an engineer for a decade and have never met anyone that would do that. We have calculators.
I think they mean napkin math. Like you’re in a meeting and they ask for a general idea if something will work or not
I suppose. I’m still internally outraged and haven’t run into such a situation before, but I accept this.
We all have phones with calculators, don’t really need to do napkin math anymore
