Re: Re: Loss of precision when using Simplify
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37019] Re: [mg36996] Re: Loss of precision when using Simplify
- From: Bill Rowe <listuser at earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 05:33:26 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On 10/4/02 at 5:01 AM, carlw at u.washington.edu (Carl K. Woll) wrote: >It seems to me that you are arguing that if you have an expression >consisting of one term which is very inprecise and another term which >is very precise or exact, then the total expression is only as precise >as the least precise portion of the expression. Yes. >This is total nonsense. Not exactly. >Consider adding the following terms: >1.234567890123456`16 + 0.00000000000000001`1 >consisting of one term with precision 16 and another term with >precision 1. By your argument, Mathematica should return an answer >with only a single digit of precision. Of course, Mathematica does no >such thing. I had not considered adding two terms with much different magnitude and much different precision. Consider a different example i.e., 1.234567890123456`16 + 0.1`1 Mathematica does not and should not return a result with 16 digits of precision