Lifehacks

Or I could just do 1.6 km ≈ 1 mile whenever I need to convert from the standard that I use, Metric, to Imperial

Far far far simpler

Edit: I'm not American, I use sensible units, SI Metric

It's rough estimation, a deviation of anything less than 50% is accurate enough for that

Edit: Ooh I thought you were trying to "um actually, it's 1.66", but I just realised they put 0.6 instead of 1.6

Closed form means it can be written out as a specific, finite set of instructions that work the same regardless of what the input to your function is.

For Fibonacci, it is most commonly defined in its recursive form:

f(0) = 0
f(1) = 1
f(x) = f(x-1) + f(x-2) for integer x > 1

But using this form, computing a very large Fibonacci number requires computing all the numbers before it, so it’s not the same finite set of instructions for every number, it takes more computation to generate larger numbers.

However, there is a closed form formula for generating Fibonacci numbers. Using this formula, you can directly compute any large Fibonacci number without having to compute all those intermediate steps. It takes the same amount of work to compute any Fibonacci number.

f(x) = (a^x - b^x)/√5
a = (1+√5)/2
b = (1-√5)/2

(Note that a and b here are constants; I only wrote them separately to avoid a mess of nested parenthesis)

For an example of something that doesn’t have a closed form, we do not know of a closed form for generating prime numbers. There are several known algorithms for generating the nth prime number, but they all depend on computing all the previous prime numbers, making it very difficult to compute very large prime numbers (in fact, how generating large primes is actually done is by making an educated guess and then checking that it’s actually prime). Discovering a closed form formula for prime numbers would have a huge impact on mathematics and cryptography.

Fun fact: there's quite a lot of countries that use "mixed metrics", with no real rhyme or reason for what uses old ancient imperial and what uses new shiny metric

UK - Miles for long distances, switch to meters for distances less than a mile, always use km in air and sea. Milk in pints, petrol in liters, water in ml, beer in pints. Human heights in Feet Inches, building heights in Meters. Human weights in a unit even Americans don't use anymore (Stone), animal weights in kg/g.

Yeah, but does the kilometer have a cool origin like the mile? Checkmate math nerd.

To be fair, kilometers make a lot more sense to me, as an American. However, everything is written in miles, and everyone speaks in miles. Estimating distance for me is easier in metric, but it isn't really acceptable.

(I play milsims, which is why I'm more used to it. Most Americans have almost zero experience with metric.)

Be like us Brits and measure short distances in metric, long distances in Imperial, yet struggle to convert between them.

GPS navigation gets frustrating. It's either metric "turn left in 4km" when all road signs and speeds are in miles, or imperial "turn in 200ft" when you have no idea how long 200ft is.