Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.

The women fighting are labeled “mathematicians defining pi” and “engineers just using 3 because it’s within tolerance”

The man smoking is labeled “astrophysicists” and the pipe is labeled “pi = 1”

  • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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    20 hours ago

    That’s kind of the beauty here, you only get a relative error (0.069%) and it’s mostly insignificant to the point of being smaller than your fabrication tolerances. This should also be the case for fibre optics. The error can’t really add up, you scale everything to a multiple of the wavelength and you calculate the wavelength using the speed of light.