On 2010-03-14 17:22, Samudra Haque wrote:
Hi, Pi-Day is today (3/14/2010) also we just sprang forward by 1 hour. (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/12/pi.day.math/index.html?hpt=C2) and apparently it's also Einsteins Birthday! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)
Wow a lot of key dates here.
Unfortunately Pi-day can not be celebrated in Europe as we have no month 14 over here. ;-)
My question is: in amateur satellite design/planning how many significant digits are used to calculate the value of pi? Is there a significant difference in results between (4 decimal poinits) and (3 decimal points).
In professional space missions, such as NASA, what is the practice with regards to use of Pi ? Are there any published standards?
Using Excel, is there any way to generate a large range of pi ?
I have often used the expression
pi = 4 * arctan(1)
to get Pi with full machine accuracy in a program.
73, Bent