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In mathematics, divided differences is an algorithm, historically used for computing tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions. [citation needed] Charles Babbage's difference engine, an early mechanical calculator, was designed to use this algorithm in its operation. [1] Divided differences is a recursive division process.
The number of steps to calculate the GCD of two natural numbers, a and b, may be denoted by T(a, b). [96] If g is the GCD of a and b, then a = mg and b = ng for two coprime numbers m and n. Then T(a, b) = T(m, n) as may be seen by dividing all the steps in the Euclidean algorithm by g. [97]
The absolute difference is used to define other quantities including the relative difference, the L 1 norm used in taxicab geometry, and graceful labelings in graph theory. When it is desirable to avoid the absolute value function – for example because it is expensive to compute, or because its derivative is not continuous – it can ...
An important application is Newton–Raphson division, which can be used to quickly find the reciprocal of a number a, using only multiplication and subtraction, that is to say the number x such that 1 / x = a. We can rephrase that as finding the zero of f(x) = 1 / x − a. We have f ′ (x) = − 1 / x 2 . Newton's ...
Pascal's calculator could add and subtract two numbers directly and thus, if the tedium could be borne, multiply and divide by repetition. Schickard's machine, constructed several decades earlier, used a clever set of mechanised multiplication tables to ease the process of multiplication and division with the adding machine as a means of ...
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Pseudocode is commonly used in textbooks and scientific publications related to computer science and numerical computation to describe algorithms in a way that is accessible to programmers regardless of their familiarity with specific programming languages.
A depends on B and C; B depends on D. Given a set of objects and a transitive relation with (,) modeling a dependency "a depends on b" ("a needs b evaluated first"), the dependency graph is a graph = (,) with the transitive reduction of R.