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Funny how 69 never seems to need any explanation... Somebody once wrote "I'm a 42(+27) girl!" on my pencil case in high school.Anyway, in the words of my current mentor (or mental, as had me giggling the other week), "Me just dumb fitter."
As a fitter & turner I work with circles every day, don't need pi too often, but it helps. Tolerances are important, but we mostly deal with radii and how concentric things are anyway, and approximations work.
However, I have often wondered and not bothered to figure out what it would involve: what would be the deal if pi were not pi but some other number (say 1)? Would that do something stupid to all other numbers, or force a weird shape in 3rd or whatever other dimension the result might fit into? How do you invert or generally muck around with something irrational?
Cheers
-- (November 22, 2003) on Pi