Readings

[winterthunder]

No problem set this week! \0/

Instead, we get two readings to mull over: Floating Point Arithmetic and Newton's Method. Now, the first one I was all right with. I can't envision a situation in which I could possibly care that Python rounds to only seventeen significant digits, but hey, I guess it's good to know these things. But what does Newton's method have to do with programming?

On a side note (and out of curiosity on my part), we started out with 30 something people following along. How many are still with us as we go into the fifth lecture? Stand up and be counted!

Comments

[vlion]

Just to throw a niggle in your spiel, computers can do symbolic computation, with sufficient gruntwork.

Maxima is an opensource package that does symbolic computation.

[jetamors]

They aren't numerical (and thanks for the correction!) but symbolic computation still uses algorithms, which was my main point.

[vlion]

Well, yes. Algorithmic, but symbol processing is a superset of the set of numeric and symbolic processing.

/nit