HP-35 origin

[brickviking]

(06-18-2018 07:47 PM)Harald Wrote:  

(06-18-2018 12:02 AM)brickviking Wrote:  If I took that phrase literally (Pi !!!), HP-50G calculates that to be 9.99999999999 E499. Somehow, I think even HP wouldn't be that crazy. Pi !! came to about 7380.55555766, and Pi! comes to 7.1881-ish, or so my HP-34C told me back in the day. That might be closer to the scale that HP was originally thinking of.

(Post 244)

When did Pi become a natural number? Factorial is only defined for natural numbers.

While that's true, certain factorial implementations (hp34c, HP48-series, HP-50G and others) interpolate non-integer results by using the Gamma function, as the factorial function is merely the integer-based special case of the Gamma function. Pretty much: \( n! = Γ(n+1) \), if I remember rightly, and I'm sorry if I can't get that Gamma to come out correctly. I had fun trying to generate the inverse... of course that's not defined anywhere mathematically, so I was told.

(Post 245)