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How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:59PM   
from the that's-the-combination-to-my-luggage! dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/

Earlier this week, we received this question from a fan on Facebook who wondered how many decimals of the mathematical constant pi (π) NASA-JPL scientists and engineers use when making calculations:

Does JPL only use 3.14 for its pi calculations? Or do you use more decimals like say: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360

We posed this question to the director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, Marc Rayman. Here's what he said:

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Original Submission

• Re:Keep the same significant digits. (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 16 2019, @08:17AM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday August 16 2019, @08:17AM (#880949) Homepage

  Hard science will often use uncertainty indicators, the equivalent of an error bar. E.g. the Fine Structure Constant is 7.2973525693(11) * 10^-3 where the (11) means a possible uncertainty of 11 in the final digits, and therefore that the last three digits 963 might in reality range from 682 to 704. Astronomy in particular will sometimes give asymmetric uncertainty indicators, but that requires fancier typesetting.

  --
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