Why Pi?
As a little gloss to the previous entry on calculating π, I'm finally reading the entertaining and enlightening article "The Quest for Pi" and find this unique observation after asking why people persist in calculating π to billions of digits:
Certainly there is no need for computing π to millions or billions of digits in practical scientific or engineering work. A value of π to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton.
[David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Peter B. Borwein, and Simon Plouffe, "The Quest for Pi", Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 19, no. 1 (Jan. 1997), pp. 50–57; reprint available online.]
Posted on September 23, 2007 at 18.01 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science