Nice post, this is definitely important material to know for technical computing.
I feel so sad when I think about the amount of time spent when people that do not know this material try to write iterative solvers for complicated problems. Ivar kl. 02:52:43 UTC+1 søndag 23. februar 2014 skrev Jason Merrill følgende: > > I'm working on a series of blog posts that highlight some basic aspects of > floating point arithmetic with examples in Julia. The first one, on > bisecting floating point numbers, is available at > > http://squishythinking.com/2014/02/22/bisecting-floats/ > > The intended audience is basically a version of me several years ago, > early in physics grad. school. I wrote a fair amount of basic numerical > code then, both for problem sets and for research, but no one ever sat me > down and explained the nuts and bolts of how computers represent numbers. I > thought that floating point numbers were basically rounded off real numbers > that didn't quite work right all the time, but were usually fine. > > In the intervening years, I've had the chance to work on a few algorithms > that leverage the detailed structure of floats, and I'd like to share some > of the lessons I picked up along the way, in case there's anyone else > reading who is now where I was then. > > Some of the material is drawn from a talk I gave at the Bay Area Julia > Users meetup in January, on the motivations behind PowerSeries.jl >
