2 ms·
Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour
by MereInterest 5y ago
Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour or two to a problem set in grad school.
(Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.