3 ms·

Similarly, this NASA blog post has some fun facts about the precision of pi that JPL uses in its calculations: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-

Similarly, this NASA blog post has some fun facts about the precision of pi that JPL uses in its calculations: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal... * JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. * How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places.

klodolph 6y ago
Note that 3.141592653589793 is the shortest decimal representation for the closest double precision float to pi.
082349872349872 6y ago
So if he'd only had interplanetary probes, غیاث الدین جمشید کاشانی‎ Ghiyās-ud-dīn Jamshīd Kāshānī could in principle have navigated them to the proper accuracy in 1424. By 1596 Ludolph van Ceulen had 20 digits, and even more by the time he designed his tombstone: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Monument_voor_PI.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Monument... 39 or 40 decimal places would have to wait until 1699. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_π https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_π