| Check
out my Square
Root 2 applet which uses the Bhaskara-Brouckner
algorithm to compute root(2) to any number of decimal places. This
is about the fastest algorithm I have found to do this computation.
I have checked this algorithm
for the first million or so decimal places by comparing it with those
posted at The
NASA Goddard Flight Centre web-site (err not by hand. I wrote
a program to do it!). The algorithm makes
extensive use of Java's BigInteger class. Also try out my PI applet which uses the BPP formula (named after Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe) to compute each hexadecimal digit of PI as a ratio of polynomials. It is a simple matter to convert these to decimal digits. The applet is fairly slow and takes a couple of minutes for 10000 decimal places. I must admit I have only checked this for the first 10000 decimal places. Please email me if you find any errors. Again this uses Java's BigInteger class to do the donkey work. |