Support for significant figures

[ghost]

Problem Statement

Significant figures (also called significant digits) are an important part of scientific and mathematical calculations and deals with the accuracy and precision of numbers. It is important to estimate uncertainty in the final result, and this is where significant figures become very important. (from Wikibooks Chemical Engineering) They're typically used from high school science to college classes these days and are used often in engineering settings. It is also part of a common core standard as per http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSN/Q/ (a.k.a. HSN-Q.A.3), so it is arguably notable enough to support.

Evidence or User Insights

There are all sorts of significant figures calculators out there already:

The sheer number of results alone shows the demand for it.

Proposal

Add support to the existing scientific calculator mode to use significant figures in calculations, or add a separate mode for making calculations with significant figures.

Goals

• Support US common core math curriculum
• Provide a great baseline significant figures-driven calculator experience in Windows Calculator

Low-Fidelity Concept

User Cans

• Compute using significant figures when using the four operations, square roots, logarithms, and other functions. (all of the aforementioned have special rules)

Requested Assignment

I'm just suggesting this idea. I don't want to implement it.

[ghost]

this supersedes #293

[MicrosoftIssueBot]

This is your friendly Microsoft Issue Bot. I've seen this issue come in and have gone to tell a human about it.

[ghost]

This pitch looks like it has everything it needs for review. In the meantime, we'll keep this idea open for discussion so the community has the chance to provide feedback. Check out our New Feedback Process for more info on the user-centered process we follow for new feature development.

[ghost]

We reviewed the pitch and would love to explore this idea further! The pitch is a great start, but there are still some open questions. I am moving this issue into planning to iron out some of those details and I created calculator-specs/sigfigs to track progress. A human will follow up with some feedback on your pitch shortly. Keep in mind that not all ideas that make it into the planning phase are guaranteed to make it to release. For more information on next steps, check out our spec workflow.

[grochocki]

We think adding support for significant figures is a great addition, but want to make sure that the spec very crisply defines the deterministic rules we are using to apply them. Also, we believe this feature is best exposed as a setting in scientific mode (as opposed to a new calculator mode). This will require a little more thinking, but we should be able to leverage some of the design improvements introduced in #428 to expose mode-specific settings.

[superusercode]

@grochocki is there any news on this? the user deleted their account so now this issue no longer appears in search and the similar issues detector that github has.

[grochocki]

@superusercode I have been investigating what to do about these ghost account issues disappearing from some surfaces (like issue search) without much luck. Despite the user deleting their account, we are still interested in this idea, and it still appears in the Feature Tracking Board.