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Baking 1000 Digits of Pi from 3 Small Lines of Python
4 min readApr 16, 2021
Python’s mpmath module is a powerful tool for high accuracy calculation that you should know
You likely know that integers in Python can grow to any reasonable size. For example, here’s a short Python program that starts with 1 and multiplies by 256 with each step. After 20 steps the resulting integer is larger than many programming languages can handle:
n = 1
for i in range(20):
n *= 256
print(n)# 256
# 65536
# 16777216
# 4294967296
# 1099511627776
# 281474976710656
# 72057594037927936
# 18446744073709551616
# 4722366482869645213696
# 1208925819614629174706176
# 309485009821345068724781056
# 79228162514264337593543950336
# 20282409603651670423947251286016
# 5192296858534827628530496329220096
# 1329227995784915872903807060280344576
# 340282366920938463463374607431768211456
# 87112285931760246646623899502532662132736
# 22300745198530623141535718272648361505980416
# 5708990770823839524233143877797980545530986496
# 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976
This is very cool, but how about floating point numbers? Can we work with many digits after the decimal point? As with many challenges in Python, yes we can!
