To be Devil’s Advocate:
Given that the rest written in Comic Sans, it may be an early elementary school exercise, aimed at teaching kids to do multiplications. In this case, it’s tolerable and/or defensible to find a simplification for pi.
That said, making pi equal to 3 would have been more accurate for that…
That’s a dumb way of teaching and you are a dumb devils advocate for saying it. Go to H E double hockey sticks.
Even in engineering it is common to just round pi to 3 and quickly estimate whatever it is your doing.
Excuse me what? I’ve been an engineer for a decade and have never met anyone that would do that. We have calculators.
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.
Unless the kid is even slightly above average and finds the idea that pi equaling 5 confusing.
…if they’re above average, I think they’ll figure out the explicitly defined variable. I think the instructor is trying to make sure this problem doesn’t require a calculator and figured defining pi as 5 makes it clear that you can treat it as a whole number. 3 would be more accurate and just as easy, but meh idk that this is that great of a blunder.
You can be a smart kid and not realize that adults are lying.
I remember the Peas and the Punnett Square. Sure, mendelian genetics explains pea plant colors, but doesn’t explain dog fur colors. Just providing a footnote that more completed genetics exists would have been nice.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=L1eegVTwDS0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Numbers are symbolic, I’d say it’s not a bad piece of homework to supplement a lesson that numbers are to be respected but ALSO to always know that they mean nothing without context.
We can appreciate the beauty of infinity in memorizing pi, but the reality we live in demands actions of whatever the fuck it is we redefine volition, will, or passion to.
I think people can be so much more, but my idea of more is tainted by the values I have. Not everyone would agree with the idea that we all deserve to live.
Survival of the fittest, they support indirectly. With actions that include the advent of modern advertising. The CIA(?) experiment on attention, catalyzed by the creation of lsd in the knowledge-obtaining-goal of understanding the mechanics of attention, were directly related to the patriot act.
I’m not claiming anything other than the fact that our “leaders,” have used their knowledge of attention spans to sway the, “masses.” The rest of us.
How do you think of the, “rest of us?”
I hope you teach your children that, and that math is the beauty we’ve come to understand in our millennia of evolutionary timescales, of fucking struggle.
You have within you, much.
Do not waste the years of before, do something to help. Not your country, but your reality. The outside. You’re something. Not “nothing but a part of.” There’s so much in the word, “just.”
That’s all I have to say. Just that. Not much. Just a tiny little wall. Sorry. I write, and I rant, and I let go. Please don’t ban me. I matter and I’m not hateful. I’m sorry.
I truly wonder what sprouted this comment. We’re all taking about how this one teacher butchered math by rounding π completely incorrect and you’re posting this half-rambling, idk if medicaments-induced, pseudo intellectual crap. This has 0 to do with it, go to some DMT board.
Nobody knows how to think like a dyscalculic at all haha… it’s just a little symbol thingy… it doesn’t have to be pi. Just like X is a little symbol thingy… the x is now just kind of a table right now… it’s just a little symbol thingy and it means five it’s not that difficult. Lmao
Yes it does have to be pi because that’s the formula for the volume of a cylinder. If you take a simple, cylindrical glass or container and measure it and apply the formula with pi, you’ll see that you’ll get the correct volume of the container. If you just want your kids to calculate a random x that’s 5* 10 *10 *10 just tell them to do that, don’t give them a made up formula, it’s not that difficult.
Well, let me put it another way. You don’t need to have an opinion on everything. It’s okay to not understand something and not have an opinion on it.
Mathematically, no, it does not. We make up the definitions. If you wanted to see what the consequences of a, I don’t know, 5-dimensional universe with Pi set to 5.65 were, you can do that. These are scribbles on pages, there is literally nothing stopping you.
Academically, what’s stopping you is whether these calculations are useful. The only problem I see here is that it’s kind of misleading to imply to someone that Pi is something it conventionally isn’t. But even then, I think I’d respect the mathematician who could recognize Pi as a symbolic name for, usually, one particular transcendental constant a little bit more than one who refused to even entertain the idea. Like, imagination is important to mathematics, too.
And to be clear, “let Pi = 3.14” is also incorrect. It is closer than 5, but it is still infinitely wrong.
[edit] And also, I was imagining this question was for a younger audience. Reading it again, I’m not going to pretend I know what’s going on up there.
Here’s a little LPT for you: you can be correct without being an obnoxious douchebag about it.
Idk, if you want to test people on how they understand formulae and order of operations without letting them just punch it into a calculator. The actual math isn’t hard, but if you don’t get substituting values into an equation then it’s not trivial
Your life is easier and better if you can do this kind of simple math in your head.
With π=5 maths break down completely. If π=5, then e^(5i) = -1, meaning -1 = cos(5) + i * sin(5), or -1 ≈ 0.284 - 0.959 i
I think you’re overthinking it. The first thing you’re told when you learn algebra is that a letter represents a number and you can say “let a equal (number), b equal (number)…” so you can let pi equal whatever you want for the purposes of one simple problem.
You’re talking about variables. But, pi isn’t a variable, it is a constant number. This would be more akin to saying “let 7 = 9”.
Or as I like to call pi…the little symbol thingy. But exactly yes, you get it.
Except pi isn’t a variable. It is a known value that we refer to as pi for convenience, and pi is a fundamental aspect of how a circle is. Saying “let pi equal 5” is all fine and well but is physically impossible, you will not be determining the volume of a cylinder if you let pi equal 5, because the ratio of a circle does not equal 5, it equals 3.14
But the question is saying to find the volume of a cylinder. Which its clearly wrong.
Well, if we want to be pedantic, they never said that h is the height and r is the radius of the base circle. They could be just random numbers.
Also, since we never calculate with all the digits of pi, it is not any less weird to round to the nearest 5 and say that it’s 5, than to the nearest 0.01 and saying it’s 3.14. It just has a higher amount of rounding error.
Wow, that takes me back - you’re referring to the floating point bug from …98?
I think it’s actually a very interesting question. Pi does not equal 5 in our universe, but perhaps we can think of a meaningful universe where it does? Perhaps some mathematicians/physicists can chime in?
