this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Doesn't have the famous
for some reason. Accurate to 14 decimal places I believe which is more accurate than what you need for 99.9% of its applications.
So to avoid memorizing a 15-digit number you'll memorize a 13-digit equation?
More like you memorize that to show off. There are tons of high schoolers that know pi to dozens of digits, it’s not really exciting. But most high schoolers fundamentally don’t understand logs.
It's been said that with 15 decimals, you can calculate the circumference on the observable universe with a precision of the width of an atom.
Not quite, according to JPL https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/
15 decimal places, for Voyager 1 - We have a circle more than 94 billion miles (more than 150 billion kilometers) around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by no more than the width of your little finger.
It's also been said that with Pi to just four decimal places you can accurately send a spaceship to one of our nearest neighbouring stars and arrive within one kilometre of your intended target.
In fairness, that was said by me, and I do tend to be full of shit.
What's it it's a big ass atom?
This is an exaggeration.
The universe's radius is around 46.5 billion light years (around 4.4 * 10^26 meters), the error introduced of using 15 decimals of pi is around the order of 10^-16. Thus the error of calculating the circumference would be in the order of
It's 39.
14 decimal places is more accuracy than you'd ever need.
Consider the size of what you're measuring.
I'm American so you're getting SAE units, deal with it.
If we have a radius of 1", the circumference of my object is 6.283185 or so inches around. Maybe it's 6.283186. the difference between those two numbers is one one hundred thousandths of an inch. About 25 nanometers. Half the size of the smallest bacterium we've ever discovered.
That is with 6 decimal places. With 8 you can measure a circumference with an accuracy to the single atom. Any smaller than that, and you start charging the result by measuring it at all.