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[Phys-L] Re: fall cleanup: sig figs



On Wednesday, Aug 10, 2005, at 16:15 America/New_York, John Denker
wrote:

. . . Let's not confuse roundoff rules with sig-digs rules. The
non-ridiculous roundoff rules are:
-- keep many enough digits to avoid any unintended loss of
precision.
-- keep few enough digits to be reasonable convenient.

Those are my rules. They are a far, far cry fom the sig-digs rules
in typical intro textbooks. . . .

And it is silly to penalize students for reporting results with one or
two insignificant digits.

Ludwik Kowalski
Let the perfect not be the enemy of the good.