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

[winterthunder]

Hmm... so, if you're writing a program that utilizes the Newton method, is there some standard bit of code that you copy and paste in, or are you writing it from scratch each time? I guess we'll find out when we watch the lecture...

[jetamors]

Yeah, if you ignore the theory it's easy to implement. My guess is that it'll be presented more or less as "this is a magic black box that gives us derivatives", but I guess we'll see. (There may also be some particular applications to programming that I don't know; it's an algorithm you can use for a lot of different things.)

[winterthunder]

I'm all for ignoring the theory. Particularly when it involves words that I barely understood when I was tested on them 5+ years ago! :D