July 2013
Intermediate to advanced
282 pages
6h 28m
English
Content preview from Good MathBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Doing Arithmetic
Of course, a natural question at this point is, can you actually do arithmetic with these things? They’re pretty, and they’re interesting, but can you actually use them? Can you do arithmetic with them?
And the answer is heck yes (so long as you’re a computer).
For a long time, no one realized that. It took until 1972, when an interesting guy named Bill Gosper came up with a solution.[7] The full details of Gosper’s methods are pretty hairy, but the basic idea of the method isn’t that hard.
Gosper’s fundamental insight was that you could use what we now call lazy evaluation to do continued-fraction arithmetic. With lazy evaluation, you don’t need to compute the digits of a continued fraction all at once; you compute them ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.