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2020-09-21, 17:39   #6
LaurV
Romulan Interpreter

Jun 2011
Thailand

100101001110002 Posts

Quote:
 Originally Posted by Batalov I was only in 8th grade
About that age (a bit younger actually), one colleague of mine and me, after we learned from the teacher that 22/7 is a "good" approximation of $$\pi$$ (known to the old Greeks too, of course), we started a "quest" to find better approximations, by increasing the denominator little by little and looking for a "suitable" numerator. No computers, all on paper, and with "pocket" calculators (which also, were kind of huge and expensive toys at the time, we call them pocket today, but in those times they were not called so, and you needed a backpack to carry them, but well... both our fathers had some accounting-related jobs...). We did this "research" for few weeks, actually, and we found few "better" approximations, of which we were very proud, and almost ready to show them to the teacher, when we realized suddenly that you can get more accurate approximations, in fact as accurate as you want, just by writing first n digits of $$\pi$$ over the corresponding power of 10, and reducing the fraction.

This is not a joke, haha, we were soooooooo disappointed!

Last fiddled with by LaurV on 2020-09-21 at 17:48