Ah but, there is always some nit picking SOB, isn’t there? Since land surveying uses the methods out plane geometry and the earth isn’t a plane surface all square miles aren’t equal.
Isn’t it true that out near the edges of the survey from a particular baseline and meridian a square mile isn’t really 5280[sup]2[/sup] square feet?
And if that’s true then the number 171,891,840 isn’t really accurate to that many places.
Not to mention that both areas, even if they’re accurately measured, are only precise to so many digits.
Assuming the final zero in your property’s area (“1.490 acres”) is truly a significant digit, the result of the division should only be given to four significant digits. I’d therefore drop everything after the “…8668”.
Bytegeist and David Simmons raise some valid points about significant figures. That percentage 0.00000086682416105383478354760761185639%
consists of 32 digits implying it has an accuracy of 1 part in 87 million trillion trillion. Wow - that is some fancy measuring job !!!
If you were to measure the Earth’s surface area to that accuracy, you would be “off” by about ± one trillionth of a square millimeter. (Others are welcome to recheck my calculations).
Assuming for a minute that Texas is roughly circular–and that’s probably good enough for our work here–and that the area given above assume it’s a plane, the area of Texas accounting for the Earth’s curvature is roughly 268,603 square miles. That’s not a significant difference in this problem.