/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14674539
Is that a water tower? We just don't know

what's the difference between "p-adic" and "base p"

doing a lot of dynamical systems / mathematical physics type stuff I hear a lot about

>hyperbolic sine, cosine
>Bessel functions
>elliptic integrals of the nth kind
>Gamma, beta functions
>Lambert's W function

Generally speaking, I'm only ever required to compute with these functions as certain properties relate to them, but to leave numerically evaluating them (as real numbers or as complex numbers) to a computer somewhere.

If I actually wanted to understand what these functions represent, why they're not expressible in terms of elementary functions, and how I might go about writing algorithms to approximate them anyway, do you guys have any recommended reading?

>>11869466