Re: Calculating e
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Re: Calculating e
I am surprised at the awnsers that this message has recieved. Justin Smith
Had Obviously not ran the program or he would have known that there wasn't
an overflow error and that his code would do the exact same thing, just a
different way. Dan Cogswell said the you would have better luck writing
this in C or BASIC. THIS IS FOR A CALCULATOR, NOT A COMPUTER!!!!! Sorry,
had to get that out. This is a calculator discussion group. Now on to the
question. I had the same problem on my calc and wasn't sure what caused it.
Through experimetation I was able to find out that the value the calc uses
for e is the exact same as the value you will get by substituting 10^12 for
A in the equation you gave. If you need to so something with this, my
opinion is to just use 10^12, because the calc can only store numbers with
14 digits, on eithere side of the decimal (except when there a really high
or low numbers, that is why it shows awnsers multiplied by ten to a power).
Hope this helped. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
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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