Annie A.M. Cuyt - Böcker

Special functions are pervasive in all fields of science and industry. The most well-known application areas are in physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science and statistics. Because of their importance, several books and websites (see for instance http: functions.wolfram.com) and a large collection of papers have been devoted to these functions. Of the standard work on the subject, the Handbook of mathematical functions with formulas, graphs and mathematical tables edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun, the American National Institute of Standards claims to have sold over 700 000 copies!But so far no project has been devoted to the systematic study of continued fraction representations for these functions. This handbook is the result of such an endeavour. We emphasise that only 10% of the continued fractions contained in this book, can also be found in the Abramowitz and Stegun project or at the Wolfram website!

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Dagstuhl Seminar 08021 on Numerical Validation in Current Hardware Architectures held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in January 2008. The 16 revised full papers presented were selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvements. The papers are organized in topical sections on languages, software systems and tools, new verification techniques based on interval arithmetic, applications in science and engineering, and novel approaches to verification.