all tags

numerical-analysis

18 notes carry this tag — 10 claims, 1 observation, 1 question, 4 captures, 1 note, 1 essay. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Essays

• 
  the floating-point thesis
  essay draft 2026-07-06 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation

Everything else

• Verify the Kahan / Intel-8087 / IEEE-754 lineage against a primary Kahan source
  capture promoted 2026-08-11 · william-kahan, intel-8087, ieee-754, floating-point, standards
• Forsythe did not coin 'computer science' — the term was already entering the language, per Knuth's 1972 CACM retrospective
  claim seedling Tier 1 2026-08-07 · computer-science-history, terminology, forsythe, knuth, myth-ledger
• Does Forsythe's 1965 Technical Report CS26 contain the 'art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers' definition, and did he coin 'computer science'?
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-08-03 · computer-science-history, terminology, forsythe, knuth, myth-ledger
• George Forsythe, credited with coining 'computer science,' built Stanford's department out of numerical analysis
  claim budding Tier 3 2026-07-11 · computer-science-history, institutional-history, numerical-analysis, terminology, myth-ledger
• William Kahan, hired to help specify Intel's 8087 coprocessor arithmetic, became the principal architect of the IEEE 754 floating-point standard
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-11 · ieee-754, william-kahan, floating-point, intel-8087, turing-award
• A number theorist's twin-prime reciprocal-sum project, not a chip test, publicly surfaced the Pentium FDIV bug in 1994
  claim budding Tier 2 2026-07-11 · pentium-fdiv-bug, thomas-nicely, twin-primes, floating-point, history-of-computing
• The Pentium FDIV bug was five missing entries in the SRT algorithm's quotient-digit lookup table; Intel attributed it to a table-generation script error, not a lithography defect
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-07-11 · pentium-fdiv-bug, srt-division, floating-point, hardware-defect, script-error
• Purdue established the first computer science department in the United States, in October 1962
  claim seedling Tier 3 2026-07-11 · computer-science-history, institutional-history, numerical-analysis, priority-dispute, myth-ledger
• Both the first US computer science department and the one popularly credited as first were founded by numerical analysts
  observation seedling Tier 3 2026-07-11 · computer-science-history, numerical-analysis, institutional-history, cross-domain-bridge, myth-ledger
• Does Forsythe's 1965 Technical Report CS26 contain the 'art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers' definition, and did he coin 'computer science'?
  question answered 2026-07-11 · computer-science-history, terminology, verification, numerical-analysis, myth-ledger
• A twin-prime number theorist's routine sanity check exposed a $475M hardware rounding defect in the Pentium
  capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-09 · numerical-analysis, floating-point, rounding-error, pentium-fdiv-bug, thomas-nicely
• Computer science's founding department wasn't Stanford's — and both origin stories trace back to numerical analysts
  capture promoted 2026-07-09 · hop, computer-science-history, numerical-analysis, institutional-history, myth-ledger-candidate
• Linnainmaa's 1970 thesis was a contribution to numerical analysis, not artificial intelligence
  claim budding Tier 2 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation, backpropagation
• Linnainmaa's algorithm computes all rounding-error sensitivities in a single backward pass — the structure now called reverse-mode automatic differentiation
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, reverse-mode-ad, automatic-differentiation, numerical-analysis, rounding-error
• The problem Linnainmaa's 1970 thesis solved was computing the sensitivity of accumulated floating-point rounding error to every local rounding error simultaneously
  claim budding Tier 1 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, numerical-analysis, rounding-error, floating-point, automatic-differentiation
• Seppo Linnainmaa's 1970 master's thesis was written in Finnish at the University of Helsinki
  claim budding Tier 4 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation, numerical-analysis, reverse-mode-ad
• the floating-point thesis
  note published 2026-06-26 · linnainmaa, backpropagation, numerical-analysis, automatic-differentiation, history-of-computation