An old puzzle, extended precision - and logs

[Dieter]

(07-30-2016 04:10 PM)ColinJDenman Wrote:  Just as an aside to the discussion, my father, a mariner had a large volume of 10-figure tables of all kinds, for navigation and other nautical purposes. Sadly, I lost them in a house move some years ago. Presumably larger precision tables would have been more commonplace in the pre-digital era.

The well known "Abramowitz & Stegun" (Handbook of Mathematical Functions) includes 10-digit tables of logs, powers and roots. The ln table has 15 digits, e^x has 18 and sin/cos even 23 digits. At least if you have a printed version or a PDF where the tables have not been removed. ;-)

Dieter