English Wikipedia - The Free Encycl...
Download this dictionary
Difference engine
A
difference engine
is an automatic
mechanical calculator
designed to tabulate
polynomial functions
. The name derives from the method of
divided differences
, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. Most mathematical functions commonly used by engineers, scientists and navigators, including
logarithmic
and
trigonometric functions
, can be
approximated
by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful
tables of numbers
.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
© This article uses material from
Wikipedia
®
and is licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License
and under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License