Precomputation: Difference between revisions

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== History ==

Before the advent of computers, printed [[lookup table]]s of values were used by people to speed up hand calculations of complex functions, such as in [[trigonometric table]]s, [[Common logarithm|logarithm tables]], and tables of [[statistical density function]]s.<ref>{{cite book

|editor1-last= Campbell-Kelly

|editor1-first= Martin|editor1-link=Martin Campbell-Kelly

|editor2-last= Croarken

|editor2-first= Mary|editor2-link=Mary Croarken

|editor3-last= Flood|editor3-link=Raymond Flood (mathematician)

|editor3-first= Raymond

|display-editors = 3 |editor4-last= Robson|editor4-link=Eleanor Robson

|editor4-first= Eleanor

|title= The History of Mathematical Tables From Sumer to Spreadsheets

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}}

</ref>

School children are often taught to memorize "[[times table]]s" to avoid calculations of the most commonly used numbers (up to 9 x 9 or 12 x 12). Even as early as 493 A.D., [[Victorius of Aquitaine]] wrote a 98-column multiplication table which gave (in [[Roman numerals]]) the product of every number from 2 to 50 times and the rows were "a list of numbers starting with one thousand, descending by hundreds to one hundred, then descending by tens to ten, then by ones to one, and then the fractions down to 1/144." <ref>Maher, David. W. J. and John F. Makowski. "Literary Evidence for Roman Arithmetic With Fractions", 'Classical Philology' (2001) Vol. 96 No. 4 (2001) pp. 376–399. (See page p. 383.)</ref>

== Examples ==