Pi approximation games

What did he/she teach?

History? drama? civics? languages? phys.ed?

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

Neither have I.

Interestingly, the command line switch to start Octave for best Matlab compatibility is --braindead.

Octave script to calculate pi to the limit of its precision by integrating a circle:

1; output_precision (20) function y=f(x) y = sqrt (1 - x^2); endfunction [v, ier, nfun, err] = quad ("f", 0, 1); v*4

I first did that 30-something years ago on an HP41 programmable calculator. It took many more lines, including the numerical integrator, and took over an hour to run ;-)

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

Oh, everthing. Just a teacher for 9-10 year olds. She was actually a good teacher in general, but even at that age I knew it was not true.

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John Devereux

True.

Absolutely.

As has been noted already, this discussion is pretty pedantic. All I am really saying is that the theoretical "true" values - that you can never measure, even if they can be said to exist at all - are irrational. In particular, I am saying that you can't call them "rational" nor "integer", unless of course your units are defined to make them rational.

...

You are almost right. The possibility exists that a pair of irrational numbers have a rational ratio. Sqrt(8)/sqtrt(2) is an example.

...

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Hence the qualifying term "unrelated". These two number are related.

Steve

Numbers obtained by measurement rather than counting necessarily describe a range. There is an infinite count of numbers within that range. If you must describe measurements in terms of "rational" and "irrational", the correct description is "both".

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

If the numbers are unrelated, then the probability is /really/ small - it is infinitesimal.

Thanks Tim, (I've cross posted just for fun) for bombing out my usenet with this thread. I can't believe this was the one which was better than any troll post!

Mark DeArman

number

This is the first time i have seen virtual particles extended to complete nuclei with associated mass rather than the usual boson and lepton = virtual particles.

?-)

Cool. You heard it from me first. If the lump of silicon is large enough, this should happen.

Someone who is actually a physicist can tell you how large. :--)

Steve

One of the candidates for kilogram artifact replacement is a perfect silicon sphere

The idea is that we'll be able to count atoms in it, thus the accuracy. Common silicon isotopes are stable, so no problem there. Also, pure isotopic materials aren't that rare---isotopic separation not difficult, just tedious and requires prodigious amounts of electrical energy. Russians used to do it next to hydro power plants; my ad visor claims to have bartered a fancy electronic boxcar averager for a piece of isotopically pure cadmium that his Russian counterpart just pulled out of his desk and cut with scissors (probably would be worth a lot today).

By the way, both kilogram and the original meter were made out of Platinum-Iridium alloy.

Wow. And given a whale big enough, do whole cells pop in and out of existence?

--
Saludos.
Ignacio G.T.