13 Feb
2020
13 Feb
'20
3:55 a.m.
On 12/02/2020, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote (in part):
But I suspect when he and his peeps were doing this
with a
slide rule or at best an Friden mechanical adding machine, they were
acutely aware of how errors accumulated or not.
This being COFF, I feel justified in chiming in with a story from my
grad student days.
A fellow student was working on something -- I have forgotten the
actual problem but studying some behaviour near a singularity -- and
he wanted some numerical values. So he obtained Fortran code from a
grad student in physics. The result blew up in his region of
interest. The person who gave him the code had no interest in
investigating because he was happy with the results in his region.
(After months of toil, he found serious approximation errors.)
N.