On Jun 17, 3:07 am, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
... > BTW, the #6 hit for factorial in Google, and the number 1 hit for > factorial calculator is this > > http://www.cs.uml.edu/~ytran/factorial.html > > One might have hoped a professor of computer science could have done a > bit better. 1. It appears that the person who wrote it is not a faculty member but perhaps a student. 2. It appears that the page is the result of a programming assignment in a class CS-1. Peter Luschny seems to have done the more or less definitive work on efficient factorial algorithms. http://www.luschny.de/math/factorial/FastFactorialFunctions.htm I think Peter has no illusions about the lack of demand for the results of such computation. So why do it? One view is, (To roughly paraphrase a colleague), "If something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing efficiently". But another view holds that this is quite wrong. In some academic circles people search for things that have not been studied much (likely: they are not worth computing). They then write papers on how to compute those things efficiently, referring to each others' papers. RJF > > Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
