On the distributions of significant digits and roundoff errors
- 1 May 1974
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 17 (5) , 269-271
- https://doi.org/10.1145/360980.360998
Abstract
Generalized logarithmic law is derived for the distribution of the first t significant digits of a random digital integer. This result is then used to determine the distribution of the roundoff errors in floating-point operations, which is a mixture of uniform and reciprocal distributions.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
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- On the Probability that a Random Integer has Initial Digit AThe American Mathematical Monthly, 1966
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