mini challenge: find the smallest cosine of an integer

[ijabbott]

(10-24-2021 08:27 AM)EdS2 Wrote:  And thanks Albert, again: I now have a glimmering of understanding that we can't get an actual zero.

I think it's partly a quality of implementation issue. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some calculator out there that would return 0 as the cosine of some integral number of radians, particularly when operating outside the domain of exact, consecutive integer representations. For example, when a decimal, floating point number represents a continuous span of at least 10, some points in that continuous span would have a cosine of 0, so a poor quality calculator might give up and return 0 (or some other value in the range [-1,1]) for all such numbers!