This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I’m counting as 16 in total, since that’s how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that’s one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits.
I know that 22/7 is an extremely good approximation for pi, since it’s written with 3 digits, but is accurate to almost 4 digits. Another good one is √10, which is accurate to a little over 2 digits.
I’ve heard that ‘field engineers’ used to use these approximations to save time when doing math by hand. But what field, exactly? Can anyone give examples of fields that use fewer than 16 digits? In the spirit of something like xkcd: Purity, could you rank different sciences by how many digits of pi they require?
As a mathematician, I don’t use any digits, but the symbol π.
As a computer scientist, same, but it’s called
PI.It’s the computer that does the thing with the digits, not me. 🙃
In which case you’re probably using a predefined 64-bit floating point number, which I think is accurate to 15 digits.
I’d like to agree, but writing π with capital letters is heresy.
Yeah, math conventions and programming conventions don’t always align. As in, basically never…