Timeline for Student: Why not use a calculator?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 3, 2014 at 17:13 | comment | added | jpmc26 | @dtldarek The question is about why you should learn how to do things that a calculator or computer can do for you. The point I'm making is that computers (including calculators) have limitations that you need to understand, and an understanding of the real mathematics that the computer is simulating is useful in identifying and working around those limitations. It's not about the difficulty; it's about knowing what the computer does and why it does or doesn't work for particular cases. | |
| Jun 3, 2014 at 15:30 | comment | added | dtldarek | @jpmc26 Your comment is only technically correct. A similar claim would be: you need right libraries to print anything to standard output (e.g. libc is a library). You make it seem hard, while it is an easy thing to do. | |
| Jun 3, 2014 at 15:23 | comment | added | kcrisman | But I think the point was that you don't even need to use those in higher-level CAS systems. (Try this.) The original questions was presumably not referring to someone coding in C++, Java, Python, or whatever. | |
| Jun 3, 2014 at 15:08 | comment | added | jpmc26 |
@dtldarek "would require using the right libraries" I don't consider it wrong to call part of a standard API a "library;" you even call it a library yourself. =) Most programming languages require you to use some special part of the API for arbitrary precision. The "normal" types (long, double, etc.) fail at some point, certainly less than 100 digits.
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| Jun 3, 2014 at 14:48 | comment | added | kcrisman | Yes, Sage certainly supports arbitrary stuff out of the box and I assume that is true for the proprietary folks as well. Oh, and I don't think that 100-digit precision is just used in pure math, otherwise people wouldn't ask for that precision with special functions. Error propagates... | |
| Jun 3, 2014 at 12:34 | comment | added | dtldarek | @jpmc26 The sentence about computers is not true anymore, "big ints" are nowadays a part of standard libraries for many programming languages. | |
| Jun 3, 2014 at 8:30 | comment | added | kjetil b halvorsen | 100-digit calculations where one need an accurate (not approximate) answer only occurs in pure mathematics. | |
| Jun 2, 2014 at 21:49 | comment | added | jpmc26 | 100-digit calculations are not very likely to work on a handheld calculator. A computer would require using the right libraries to get an accurate answer. | |
| Jun 2, 2014 at 16:06 | review | First posts | |||
| Jun 2, 2014 at 19:58 | |||||
| Jun 2, 2014 at 15:47 | history | answered | kcrisman | CC BY-SA 3.0 |