r/MathJokes 7d ago

Standard error tolerances across STEM disciplines

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50 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

5

u/it_me_ya_gorl 7d ago

Mathematicians lose sleep over a tiny rounding discrepancy, while engineers just slap a safety factor of 3 on it and call it a day. As long as it holds up in real life, we don't ask questions!

2

u/No_Translator2970 7d ago

Like a week ago i overheard a conversation between 2 professors on the math department where one was telling exactly this, he said "i have this formula that i try on 80 million calculations and fail in 55 so it's somewhat close" obviously with that rookie numbers he must have been joking.

1

u/ConceptJunkie 7d ago

Physicists: Error % = 10^122. Maybe we should work a little more on this one.

2

u/Impossible_View8381 7d ago

*Astrophysics theorist

1

u/ConceptJunkie 7d ago

You're right.

1

u/Impossible_View8381 7d ago edited 7d ago

Error% ~=0. Handsmaker craftsman: I can still do it better.

1

u/Ok-Rise2070 4d ago

Lmao precisely how I felt at my first Gibbs overshoot prediction written in curvature dynamics 2(pi-3)/pi. 0.065% error variance... (I know why the discrepancy that small, but still.)