Talk:Mathematical table

Time-space trade off

I removed "Since the cost per megabyte of memory is at present falling at a faster rate than is the cost per unit of CPU performance, one would expect the use of lookup tables to be increasing, in a space-for-time tradeoff." That sounds reasonable, but it probably isn't true. Computer memory has been cheap enough to allow such optimization for a long time. We used tables to speed up trig functions in robot controllers 25 years ago, when memory cost over 100,000 times as much per meg as it does in 2006. Today it's quite likely no one bothers to do that in similar applications because inexpensive CPUs are fast enough to keep up with whatever calculations are needed using standard libraries. --agr 14:26, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

Multiplication table?

Since there is a separate article on the Multiplication table, do we need to include it here. A trig or log table would be a better example.--agr 03:13, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

'Computers'

"This was motivated mainly by errors in logarithmic tables made by the human 'computers' of the time."

It seems weird to put computers in quotes when this is the original sense of the word. Like it's suggesting that these are so-called computers. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 12:52, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Computation, Culture, and Society

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 March 2026 and 3 June 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jliu26 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:21, 3 June 2026 (UTC)