Re: Fortran vs. Octave/Matlab

nmm1@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
In article <f9436995-4e6e-42ca-8f7d-e8d144891f1b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
TideMan <mulgor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 3, 8:23=A0pm, frank <fr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:45:47 -0500, user1 wrote:
They should also learn how to do square roots by hand.
I swear I learned how to do this in high school but completely forget the
method. =A0How does it go?
It was intermediate school (=3Djunior high in US?) for me and I remember
that you have to pair off the digits from the right, but then what?
As usual, Google can tell us:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/squareRoot.html

It's also a stupid way to do it, and has been for 300 years.

One can justify changing that to "3,000 years" if one is willing to take Heron's (Heron of Alexandria, Century 1) word that the Babylonians knew the use of x_{n+1} = (x_n + N/x_n)/2 .

-- mecej4

Solving
the equation x^2 = a is FAR better, whether you use binary chop,
Newton-Raphson or iterative linear interpolation. And, yes, you
can do any of those in your head with a little practice.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.
.

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