this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Who said Pi is infinite? If we take Pi as base unit, it is exactly 1. No fraction, perfectly round.

Now everything else requires an infinite precision.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Eek, that makes my skin crawl. Taking what you said literally would imply that π² = π.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Engineers be like:

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm pretty sure a base-Pi counting system would mean that Pi is π, not 1.

You'd count π, 2π, 3π, 4π, and so on. It doesn't change reality, just the way you count and represent numbers.

I might be off, but it's definitely not π = 1.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You still think in 1-based system, Pi unit * Pi unit is Pi of Pi units or 3.14159.. Pi units. Also, Pi unit / Pi unit is 1/Pi Pi units or 0.318309886183790.. Pi units..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'm confused, how is pi used as a unit? My understanding is that it's a number

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

6π is an acceptable answer for finding the circumference of a circle with a radius of 3 units of something.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

1 is also a number, a number we chose by convention to be a base unit for all numbers. You can break down every number down to this unit.

20 is 20 1s. 1.5 is 1 and a half 1.

If we have Pi as a unit, circumference of a circle would be radius*2 of Pi units. But everything that doesn't involve Pi would be a fraction of Pi, e.g. a normal 1 is roughly 1/3 of Pi units, 314 is roughly 100 Pi units, etc. etc.