Fun little math trick I find really helpful: the ratio of a mile to a kilometer is within 1% of the Golden Ratio. That means that if you have a good memory for Fibonacci numbers (1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89) you can convert pretty accurately by taking consecutive Fibonacci numbers.
For example, 89 kilometers is really close to 55 miles (55.3). Or, say you need to convert 26 miles to kilometers: 26 can be written as 21 plus 5, so taking the next Fibonacci number up gives 34 and 8, meaning it should be around 42 kilometers. Sure enough, it’s 41.8 km!
i need several moments, math like this scares me
Not gonna lie, as much as I want to be helpful and comprehensible, I am very proud of provoking that reaction image.
I can actually answer this!
Pi: whenever you have a math problem where you’re adding the square of one thing to the square of another thing, which is really common across a ton of disciplines, you can model that geometrically as a circle, and therefore you naturally get pi a lot of the time.
Golden ratio: thanks to something called Continued Fractions, the golden ratio is the HARDEST number to approximate by fractions. Every other number has a better relationship between [size of denominator] and [accuracy of approximation] than the golden ratio does. This sounds bad, but it’s GREAT if you’re, for example, a plant trying to decide how to space your leaves. If you put a leaf directly over another leaf, that’s bad because you are shading the bottom leaf. If you space them out by the golden ratio, you get the minimum overlap.
Brinens and Things 