Here are some of the key concepts that we've studied in this lesson:
- Drawing a diagram
is often the most crucial part of the modeling phase.
It helps you extract what is important and ignore what is irrelevant.
- Maple, as well as your pocket calculator and other programming languages,
use floating-point numbers to represent real numbers. Floating-point
arithmetic entails roundoff error, quite separate from the roundoff error
inherent in physical measurements.
- In a stable computation, the length of the floating-point numbers will affect
the number of digits produced, but not their correctness. Before doing a
floating-point computation, you should look for opportunities to simplify to
eliminate instabilities.
- There are three rules of thumb for estimating an upper bound on the
number of significant digits in a computation based upon inexact physical
measurements.
Joseph L. Zachary
Hamlet Project
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah