Help for a student project on calculator algorithms

[ijabbott]

My guess is that CORDIC isn't used by calculators that run on generic CPU architectures with fast multiplication and sufficient ROM for storing plenty of coefficients. Rather, sine and cosine of an angle within a certain domain of width pi/2 can be approximated by a polynomial of sufficiently high degree and particular coefficients.

Key phrases to look up are "Taylor series" and "Chebychev polynomials" (also transliterated as "Tchebycheff").

The polynomials can be calculated using Horner's method. That's another thing to look up. Charles Babbage's mechanical "Difference Engine" also used Horner's method to evaluate polynomials for calculating log tables etc., although a complete Difference Engine was not constructed until a century or so after Babbage's death.

EDIT: Ignore what I wrote about Babbages's Difference Engine above. It does use polynomials, but doesn't use Horner's method. It uses the finite difference method (hence the name) to evaluate successive elements of a sequence defined by a polynomial.