[cwmma]

in American math classes (as opposed to science classes) you almost never expand PI or sqrt(2), you either cancel them out or leave them in the answer until the end. Maybe if it's a word problem you sub them in the very last step but the problem itself is almost certainly going to be designed so it's not an issue.

[Suppafly]

>in American math classes (as opposed to science classes) you almost never expand PI

Except we have some fascination with memorizing the digits of pi and having competitions for doing so for some reason.

[mrguyorama]

There is no school math test that will require you to know the digits of Pi, except as a silly extra credit question.

The fascination is just dick measuring. "I'm smarter than you", for memorizing a longer string? It's quite dumb, but American media loves to use the dumbest possible ways of demonstrating that a character is intelligent, because uh it's really really hard to demonstrate "This person is very intelligent" to a subset of the population that is mostly at a middle school reading level and barely comprehends basic arithmetic, let alone algebra.

[anthk]

And that's useless for actual math.

[Suppafly]

>And that's useless for actual math.

Agreed. The schools always seem to have these learning adjacent things that are theoretically supposed to make subjects engaging, but in reality are so disconnected from the subject that they are meaningless.

[anthk]

Even the games/puzzles from Martin Gardner are a much better solution than memorizing a random... string. Because pi is not about 3.1415... but a proportion.

[BobaFloutist]

Just for fun.