And of course if the numbers are very close one has to be careful about numerical round-off and so on. But for example in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language today — particularly with their built-in precision tracking for numbers — we often use numerical approximations internally as part of deriving exact results, much like Ramanujan did.
Who Was Ramanujan?
Stephen Wolfram
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In 1998–99 I made a table with lots of approximations with the inbetween numbers.