Re: Calculating e

To: CALC-TI@LISTS.PPP.TI.COM
Subject: Re: Calculating e
From: Ray Kremer <rkremer@BRADLEY.EDU>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 12:17:40 -0500
Reply-To: Ray Kremer <rkremer@BRADLEY.EDU>

Yes.  This is all I meant by my original post.  Doing this in the calculator
with the original program mentioned is "not useful" because doing it
with a different program or on a different computer will give you more
decimal places.  Due to the rounding error, the calculator will only
find e to the number of decimal places that it already has predefined as e.
If you were to do this with another method that would get you those extra
decimal places, then that would be "useful" or at least "more useful".
Some people need to learn not to overreact so much.

>
>Of course you are never going to be able to calculate e _exactly_, any more
>than you can calculate pi exactly (I believe that some 51 billion digits of
>pi are currently known, but that is just a start...).  Using the floating-point
>arithmetic routines built into the calculator, and representing your results
>as scalars, will only take you so far.  After about twelve or thirteen digits
>you start to run into round-off error.  That's the way the calculator is built.
>