high precision mathematics

[Paul Rubin]

"Karl M. Syring" <syring at email.com> writes:
> But this is really dilettantic work and NASA today is an organization run by
> amateurs. If you look at real computational geometry programs like CGAL, you
> can see, how it is done.
> Anyway, it is not necessary to appeal to authorities to get a grasp of the
> problem.: Imagine, you have a polygon in the plane and you do a series of
> rotations and translations on it. Now, you want to know whether the position
> is exactly identical to another polygon. If you do this with floating point,
> you will never get an exact result, while in rational coordinates you always
> will.

Physical simulations and computational geometry don't have much in common.