How can we use irrational numbers in math if we don’t know the full number?
In: 232
Because real life isn’t that precise.
This was something I had to get over when I went into Engineering back in the early 2000s. Significant digits. Those things you learned in high school actually mean something. So if you are measuring out some wood and you got a tape measure, the best you can measure is going to be 0.001 meters. Since means that any other number you use past 3 decimal points is worthless since you don’t know the 4th and on for the length. It looks like 1mm so you use 1mm. Not 1.0 which means you know its 1 mm down to the tenth. 1.00 means you know its 1mm down to the hundredth of a mm giving you more and more significant digits.
So if you got 0.001m (1mm), pi past 3.142 is useless because your primary measurement you are working with is only significant to 1mm. Any decimal past that should be truncated and rounded. So you did some math and you used 3.141592 for pi, you end up with a final value for 0.0031233 as your answer, its is only good to 0.003.
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