Presentation on Sunday at 11:10 a.m. to 12:40 p.m. in Tutorial Room 2195.
Exponentiation is just extended multiplication, or is it? Only up to a point. In reality, Real numbers don't really exist, there are only a finite number of Integers, negative zero is not always the same as positive zero, and Complex numbers really are. All of which make exponentiation both subtle and computationally expensive. A retrospective and prospective of the intricacies of reification of 'number' and the occasional futility of mathematical operations in particular, **.
Use cases and examples of operations and functions related to exponentiation (e.g. power, square root, logarithm, hyperbolic cosine) will be drawn from Python and informed by FORTRAN, C. Implementations within Python will be compared and viewed through the lenses of CPython, NumPy, SciPy, Numba, PyPy, Decimal, Fractions, SymPy and more.
A guided hands-on tour of the tools and challenges of working with bigger and bigger numbers and really tiny ones, too. We'll be looking under the covers to see what Python really does with numbers and operators by utilizing %timeit, dis, with just a taste of Concrete and Abstract Syntax, down to the underlying C code.
en zyme has been a coder scientist for decades, traversing meteorology, telecom, biotech, and was into data before it was big.
en zyme is the founder of Ad, Hock & Nimble [ a data consultancy] and of 40th Parallel Python. en zyme can be reached at en_zyme@outlook.com or enzyme@bu.edu