5 research outputs found
The Borwein brothers, Pi and the AGM
We consider some of Jonathan and Peter Borweins' contributions to the
high-precision computation of and the elementary functions, with
particular reference to their book "Pi and the AGM" (Wiley, 1987). Here "AGM"
is the arithmetic-geometric mean of Gauss and Legendre. Because the AGM
converges quadratically, it can be combined with fast multiplication algorithms
to give fast algorithms for the -bit computation of , and more
generally the elementary functions. These algorithms run in almost linear time
, where is the time for -bit multiplication. We
outline some of the results and algorithms given in Pi and the AGM, and present
some related (but new) results. In particular, we improve the published error
bounds for some quadratically and quartically convergent algorithms for ,
such as the Gauss-Legendre algorithm. We show that an iteration of the
Borwein-Borwein quartic algorithm for is equivalent to two iterations of
the Gauss-Legendre quadratic algorithm for , in the sense that they
produce exactly the same sequence of approximations to if performed using
exact arithmetic.Comment: 24 pages, 6 tables. Changed style file and reformatted algorithms in
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