>> ...OK, just read it. Doesn't seem to address very much.
> 
> I was thinking of:
> 


> trigonometric functions and inverse trigonometric functions)."
> 
> and
> 
> "For purposes of numeric computations, being in closed form is not in 
> general necessary, as many limits and integrals can be efficiently 
> computed."
> 
> Which seem to exactly cover both of the points you recently mentioned, 
> but perhaps I misunderstood what points you were making.

Oh, I see. I thought it was going to say something more insightful than 
that. (How the hell do you compute a limit or an integral anyway?)

>> Also, I've often wondered how the **** you compute something like the 
>> Gamma function or the Bessel-J function. I mean, have you *seen* the 
>> definition?!
> 
> Yes.  If you take a look at the Wikipedia article for the gamma function 
> you'll see that it includes a couple of nice representations in terms of 
> infinite products.

But you can't compute an infinite product.

> The Bessel functions seem a bit more involved, but 
> it has representations in terms of a sum over terms involving the gamma 
> function, a hypergeometric series, and a recursive relation to a 
> continued fraction -- so there seem to be many ways to go about 
> computing it (I didn't look up what the standard approach in practice was).

Uh...OK.

> I know that you say that you have trouble digesting the Wikipedia 
> articles on these in full (entirely understandable, they are very dense 
> and not always well written) but you still can answer these questions by 
> spending a minute or two just skimming over them without trying to 
> understand everything.

Heh. Some of them explain things quite clearly, but others are 
incomprehensible. That's the trouble with a reference source written by 
bored Internet surfers; first it's a reference, not an introduction, and 
second the quality is *highly* variable. ;-)

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