171 © Sandeep Nagar 2017 S. Nagar, Introduction to MATLAB for Engineers and Scientists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3189-0_7 CHAPTER 7 Approximate answers in numerical computation 7.1 Numerical Approximations In the course of scientific investigation, finding exact answers may not be possible at times. Instead of devoting a lot of effort trying to find an exact answer by solving the problem analytically, another alternative is to develop methods to produce approximate answers. This is particularly true for solutions involving irrational numbers like pi. You can choose the number of significant digits to be used with pi and determine the accuracy of the result. The degree of accuracy required always depends on the targeted application. For example, when measuring the length of a building, we don’t need the answer to be accurate to the length of an atom (Å). When measuring a person’s body temperature, we don’t need to be accurate to more than two decimal places for most applications. In the era of faster and more efficient computers, higher accuracies of computations can be calculated by investing more time and memory storage, whenever required. But this must be used judiciously.