Depends on the level of precision you need. If I want the volume in a 500 foot long, 3 inch pipe to roughly estimate how much supply I need to order, I wouldn’t need a calculator. It would very roughly be 90-95 ft3. (Divide 500 by 4 two times and multiple by 3)
Then I would spend 5 minutes double checking myself haha.
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.
To be fair most of the situations where I’ve run into this have never involved pi, and sometimes it’s just qualitative.
That makes sense. I feel like if you’re at the point where pi is meaningfully involved, you should probably do your math.
Yeah I agree. It isn’t that hard to set up things in Excel to get a decent answer.
We all have phones with calculators, don’t really need to do napkin math anymore
Depends on the level of precision you need. If I want the volume in a 500 foot long, 3 inch pipe to roughly estimate how much supply I need to order, I wouldn’t need a calculator. It would very roughly be 90-95 ft3. (Divide 500 by 4 two times and multiple by 3)
Then I would spend 5 minutes double checking myself haha.