Re: Calculating e
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Re: Calculating e
You would probably have better luck if you tried writng that program in C or
in basic. The calculator rounds at about 12 digits, but I think basic will
carry to 16. I'm not sure about C.
Lisa Ledwith wrote in message ...
>I wanted to illustrate on the calculator how (1+1/A)^A goes towards e as A
>becomes large so I wrote the following program. Everything is fine until I
>get to 10 x 10^13 because the value for B is greater than e. I think this
>is probably a rounding error but I don't know what is really happening. I
>understand what is happening when A is 10x10^14 --- at least I am assuming
>that the overflow in the calculator allows 1/A to be undefined so from that
>point on the calculator thinks it is rasing 1 to a power and thus yeilds 1.
>I added the lines in the program to dispay the value of A and then played
>around a bit. When I increase A's value by multiples of 5 or 2, similar
>things happened. If I change the multiplier to 5 or 3, I eventually get
>numbers on either side of e. Also, if I change my seed, A, to 9, I get
>weird results. Can anyone explain what is happening here? At the very
>least, I have another example of how the calculator can 'lie'.
>
>10 stor A
>Lbl 1
>(1+1/A)^A sto B
>DISP B
>DISP A
>A*10 sto A
>PAUSE
>GOTO 1
>
>Lisa Ledwith
>Germantown Academy
>Fort Washington, PA
>Mathematics Teacher
>
>lledw@ga.k12.pa.us
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