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Knuth's 25th Christmas Lecture – Pi and the Art of Computer Programming (i-programmer.info)
9 points by fortran77 on Dec 25, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Slight tangent..

a better rough approximation of pi than 22/7 is 355/113


[Note: haven't watched the lecture yet.]

Though see also https://blog.wolfram.com/2011/06/30/all-rational-approximati... - "All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless", in the sense that it's no harder to memorize the decimal expansion with the same level of precision.

22/7 can be "better", or at least easier, for hand calculations, if only 2 digits of precision is needed and one of the other terms in the calculation can cancel out the 7 or the 11 (or 22) in the above ratio.




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