Our own Bala Ravikumar will be giving a talk on how to approximate the computation of extremely large numbers that physically cannot be represented as plain binary code.

Numbers like 2^2^1000 are so large that even if every elementary particle in the universe is used to store one of its digits, it is still not possible to store the number. We address the problem of computing some of the specified digits of such numbers. Some interesting mathematical issues related to such computations will be discussed in this talk.

The presentation will be Wednesday October 1 at 4:00 PM in Darwin 103. Come early (3:45) for coffee and cookies. Pizza will be provided after the talk.

Visit the Math Colloquium page for more information about the weekly Math colloquiums.