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”
From the article for anyone who cares, NASA uses 15 digits (
3.141592653589793
) because at Voyagers current distance from earth (~48 billion kilometers) that would give you an accuracy of less than half an inch.