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>> 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?)
>
> Ahh, no nothing more insightful, just that it did address the major
> points you were worrying about.
>
> Also, I'll assume you mean "how do you numerically compute a limit or
> integral?":
>
> If it's a limit, just compute it for numbers as close as possible to the
> limiting value (or really really big numbers if the limiting value is
> infinite). The closer (or the bigger) the number you compute it for the
> closer your answer will be.
Wouldn't that be increadibly unstable, numerically?
> If it's an integral do something like this:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sum
I see. (Although I'm still not sure how you compute an infinite integral
this way...)
>> But you can't compute an infinite product.
>
> If the product converges (which it does, otherwise you couldn't define a
> number/function with it) then you can by definition get an arbitrarily
> good approximation by computing the product of the first n terms for a
> large enough n.
I don't see how that is the case.
If you have an infinite *sum*, then as long as the terms get
progressively more tiny and never get larger again, you can disregard
all the terms after a certain point. But if you're taking a *product*
then any term, anywhere in the series could radically alter the final
result.
> Out of curiosity have you ever had a calculus class?
I've never had *any* maths class!
(Unless you count what we did at school. This simply involved filling
out hundreds of thousands of pages of long-division problems over a
7-year period...)
Hypothetically I shouldn't be able to do algebra at all...
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