Fritz Bauer, eminent German computer scientist and last surviving member of the organizing committee of the 1964 Gatlingburg Conference on Numerical Algebra, passed away on March 26 at the age of 90.... 更多内容 >>

This is the third in a multi-part series on the MATLAB random number generators. MATLAB has used variants of George Marsaglia's ziggurat algorithm to generate normally distributed random numbers for almost twenty years. ... 更多内容 >>

This is the first of a multi-part series about the MATLAB random number generators.... 更多内容 >>

I came across this "ornamental geometric inequality" in a tribute to Lothar Collatz.... 更多内容 >>

If $n$ is odd, replace $n$ by $3n+1$, if not, replace $n$ by $n/2$. Repeat. A famous conjecture made by Lothar Collatz is that no matter what value of $n$ is chosen to start, the process eventually terminates at $n=1$. Do not expect a proof, or a counterexample, in this blog. ... 更多内容 >>

The prime spiral was discovered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, and featured on the cover of Scientific American in March, 1964. ... 更多内容 >>

An incredible book, published in several editions from 1909 to 1933, by German mathematicians Eugene Jahnke and Fritz Emde, contains definitions and formulas for mathematical functions, hand-calculated tables of function values, and meticulous hand-drawn 2- and 3-dimensional graphs. An English edition was published by Dover in 1945.... 更多内容 >>

For several years we thought Hadamard matrices showed maximum element growth for Gaussian elimination with complete pivoting. We were wrong. ... 更多内容 >>

Denormal floating point numbers and gradual underflow are an underappreciated feature of the IEEE floating point standard. Double precision denormals are so tiny that they are rarely numerically significant, but single precision denormals can be in the range where they affect some otherwise unremarkable computations. Historically, gradual underflow proved to be very controversial during the committee deliberations that developed the standard. ... 更多内容 >>

This is the first part of a two-part series about the single- and double precision floating point numbers that MATLAB uses for almost all of its arithmetic operations. (This post is adapted from section 1.7 of my book Numerical Computing with MATLAB, published by MathWorks and SIAM.) ... 更多内容 >>