Numerical Analysis
Numerical analysis provides a variety of techniques to compute approximations to mathematical numerical values. Errors arise from a trade-off between efficiency and precision, which is limited anyway, since (using floating-point arithmetic) only some rational numbers can be represented exactly. The discrepancy between the exact mathematical value and the computed value is called the approximation error.
Read more about this topic: Error
Famous quotes containing the words numerical and/or analysis:
“The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)