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Author mark.dickinson
Recipients mark.dickinson, nirinA, rhettinger, steven.daprano, stutzbach, terry.reedy
Date 2009-09-30.18:35:22
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Message-id <1254335737.01.0.378126127915.issue3366@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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Content
A first attempt for lgamma, using Lanczos' formula.

In general, this gives very good accuracy.  As the tests show, there's one 
big problem area, namely when gamma(x) is close to +-1, so that lgamma(x) 
is close to 0.  This happens for x ~ 1.0,  x ~ 2.0, and various negative 
values of x (mathematically, lgamma(x) hits zero twice in each interval 
(n-1, n) for n <= -2).  In that case the accuracy is still good in 
absolute terms (around 1e-15 absolute error), but terrible in ulp terms.

I think it's reasonable to allow an absolute error of a few times the 
machine epsilon in lgamma:  for many uses, the lgamma result will be
exponentiated at some point (often after adding or subtracting other 
lgamma results), and at that point this absolute error just becomes a 
small relative error.
History
Date User Action Args
2009-09-30 18:35:37mark.dickinsonsetrecipients: + mark.dickinson, rhettinger, terry.reedy, stutzbach, nirinA, steven.daprano
2009-09-30 18:35:37mark.dickinsonsetmessageid: <1254335737.01.0.378126127915.issue3366@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2009-09-30 18:35:30mark.dickinsonlinkissue3366 messages
2009-09-30 18:35:29mark.dickinsoncreate