this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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you can trucate it and it still only a slightly worse approximation:
987/123 = 8.024
98/12 = 8.167
9/1 = 9.000
The last one is pretty bad you should probably not use it
9/1 ≈ 8
16/2 is an almost exact replacement for 8. OP's name includes Fermat, and so he's probably smarter than me though.
9/1 is approximately 8, for extremely large values of 8.
Hello, fellow old nerd.
Nah, the engineer probably designed it with a safety factor. You could probably even go 9/0 and be perfectly safe ;)
what about 8/1 would that be save?
Don't cut corners
Have you considered running for Indiana governor? You have the right mindset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
For that last one, how bad are we talking? I need to know soon, I have some important banking software I need to develop.
I wouldn't use it for precise calculations at NASA, but for banking stuff I think it would be fine :)
It depends on the scale of the thing you're using it for.
By the way guys, a very similar approximation for 8, which also starts at 9.000 for n=1, but quickly gets much closer to 8 for increasing n, is:
exp{-2(n-1)} + 8It approaches 8 about as fast as the above method but this one has a simple formula that is usable in python etc.