In Father Cooper's basement I learned many embarrassing things. One of them was that I didn't know what factorial meant. But there was an HP calculator in that basement that I could program. The factorial function meant 1x2x3x4 all the way to n. On the HP calculator, the biggest number it could handle was 99.999999 E99. And the closest way to get to that number was to program in 69 factorial. If you did so, the display would whir and after about 20 seconds it would flash the answer.
At the time, the idea that you could get a machine to count to such a ridiculously large number (which is bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe) in under a minute was crazy cool and mind-bending. There was no such need for those kinds of numbers, but here was a machine that could count that high.
My iPhone can count higher. It can do 103 factorial in a split second giving me 9.9029 E163.
So do you mean, its better to use calculator in iPhone than the usuall calculator?
I can't imagine using iPhone as my calculator in some exams. And I dont think so, professors would allow that.
Posted by: Keith Blaze | August 06, 2010 at 07:27 PM