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2007-01-24 14:20:19 · 2 answers · asked by dieyra_dolphin04 1 in Science & Mathematics Mathematics

2 answers

The word is a label - surds don't so much have applications as just happen. The "true" answer in many calculations is a surd, such as the square root of 2. In the computer age we don't often think of them as such, because we can ask a computer to give us the square root of two and it will state it to whatever number of decimal places it can manage. While this "numerical solution" may be suitable for engineering, navigation, and many other purposes, from a mathematical standpoint it is not the true "analytical solution".

In computing a long or infinite tail of decimal places can be inconvenient because any number that exceeds the limit of the computer's capacity for decimal places has to be truncated and rounded at the last decimal place. When this number is used for a subsequent calculation, a small error is thus introduced. Over thousands or millions of subsequent calculations, such as might be done to produce a weather forecast, it is possible to end up with a slightly or even very different answer to the analytical solution. So it's not always safe to forget what you're dealing with.

2007-01-24 21:40:00 · answer #1 · answered by moblet 4 · 0 0

dunno...What's surd?

2007-01-24 22:28:22 · answer #2 · answered by Helmut 7 · 0 0

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