Newbie Programming Confusion

[Thomas Klemm]

You could use double angle formulas for cosine and sine to come up with simpler formulas that lead to this Python program:

Code:

from math import sqrt

c, s = 0.0, 2.0
for i in range(20):
    c = sqrt((1 + c)/2)
    s = s / c
    print s

This short program runs on most older HP-calculators:

Code:

1
+
2
/
SQRT
/
LASTX

Just start with:

2 ENTER
0

And then run the program until you reach 1.
The resulting approximation of \(\pi\) can then be displayed with:

X<>Y


Kind regards
Thomas

PS: I haven't seen that font of the heading in the linked article for a long time.


We might use it in this forum in titles: