Home * Humor and Games * Code * Music * Mathematics * Discussion * Reading * Site news * Film * Baseball * Verse * Links * Search

The Code Lair

Our Interactive Scientific Web Calculator

(Bringing these high-falutin' computers back to their roots! Square and otherwise.)

Yep, this calculator is capable of computing your arithmetical expressions, in high precision (80-90 significant figures) if necessary. Just type in the expression that you want evaluated and let it go.

Note that, as in all floating point calculations, precision decreases depending on the number of intermediate calculations that are done. So although sqrt(10^6)-10^3 returns a number that is 0 to 65 decimal places, sqrt(10^10000)-10^5000 returns a very large negative number, even though both numbers individually are correct to at least 40 places. Precision is increased automatically by the code in certain calculations to preserve accuracy as much as possible, but beware of such classically degenerate cases.

Command Syntax

You can write the expression just as you would on paper, using + for addition, - for subtraction, * for multiplication, and / for division. You may use parentheses to indicate the order of operations; rules of precedence are used when parentheses are absent. ^ is the exponentiation operator, it indicates the left number raised to the right number power (2^2 = 4, 2^3 = 8, etc.) "pi" is the mathematical constant pi, "e" is the constant e, "catalan" is Catalan's constant.

In addition, you can use the following mathematical functions:

sqrt()	Returns the square root of the bracketed expression
exp()	Returns e raised to the power of the bracketed expression
log()	Returns the logarithm base e of the bracketed expression
abs()	Returns the absolute value of the bracketed expression
trunc()	Truncates the value of the expression to an integer (removing the decimal part)
cos(), sin(), tan()	Basic trigonometric functions (all angles in radians)
sec(), csc(), cot()	Reciprocal trigonometric functions
acos(), asin(), atan()	Basic inverse trigonometric functions

visits since 12:19 AM PST 26 Jan 2003