federico@actisb.UUCP (Federico Heinz) (07/01/91)
I was palying around with TeX, Emacs and Mathematica, writing some
notes for an upcoming exam, when I ran into some stupid calculation I
needed. Having just used it to do symbolic integration and other
niceties, I boldly entered it into Mathematica, pressed ENTER, and
waited. And waited. And kept waiting. Meanwhile, my hard disk was
seeking like there was no tomorrow. I checked 'ps -xv' (in a moment
when the screen wasn't frozen)---just to find out that the Kernel had
grown to about 46 MB. Now for the fun part: the calculation that was
eating my computing ressources was (just a sec... copy... paste... presto!)
2 0.000004165885563123581/(0.0833177112624716/2 + 2 0.000004165885563123581)
which was pretty easy to compute using my pocket calculator while my
NeXT was still trying. As a matter of fact, it never found out the
answer, since I killed the kernel (interrupting it wouldn't work!). I
tried again with a fresh kernel, with exactly the same results. Now,
shouldn't Mathematica do this without a wink? Have I hit an anomaly,
or am I plain stupid and don't notice some terrible mistake? I'm doing
this on an '040 Cube with 16 MB RAM, System 2.0 (I know, Eric, I know.
Real Soon Now). Any takers?
--
Federico Heinz (federico@actis.de)