Asklemmy

43671 readers

1653 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

129

What field do you work in, and how many digits of pi do you use? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by nycki@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

125 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

if you round it to 1, that’s zero digits.

Isn’t rounding to zero digits a nonsensical concept? And “1” is one digit, not zero digits.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t rounding to zero digits a nonsensical concept?

Mostly, yeah. But sometimes you really just need to know the order of magnitude, which is a process kinda similar to rounding, but does lose a digit in the process, so you could kinda argue—if you squint a little—that it's "rounding to zero digits".

[–] nycki@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's basically my reasoning, yeah. Specifically, in floating point notation; if you get rid of all the mantissa bits, you'd be left with 1 * 2^0. I suppose it could be 0 * 2^0, but a leading 1 is implied, since virtually all numbers are nonzero.

[–] Perhyte@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

Small correction: Pi lies between 2^1 and 2^2, so its floating-point exponent is 1. With all the mantissa bits cleared you'd be left with 1 * 2^1, not 1 * 2^0.