[Tutor] largest and smallest numbers

[John Fouhy]

You've got upper and lower bounds - maybe you could do a binary search
to find the max exactly? It should only take the same number of steps
again...

On 9/25/07, Terry Carroll <carroll at tjc.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Christopher Spears wrote:
>
> > How can I find the largest float and complex numbers?
>
> That's an interesting question..
>
> I just tried this:
>
> x = 2.0
> while True:
>     x = x*2
>     print x
>     if repr(x) == "1.#INF": break
>
> to just keep doubling X until Python began representing it as infinity.
> My output:
>
> 4.0
> 8.0
> 16.0
> 32.0
> 64.0
> 128.0
>  . . .
> 137438953472.0
> 274877906944.0
> 549755813888.0
> 1.09951162778e+012
> 2.19902325555e+012
> 4.3980465111e+012
>  . . .
> 2.24711641858e+307
> 4.49423283716e+307
> 8.98846567431e+307
> 1.#INF
>
> So I'd say, the answer is somewhere between 8.98846567431e+307 and double
> that.
>
> On complex numbers, I'm not so sure.  My math is rusty. Is there a concept
> of "greater than" or "largest" in complex numbers on different axis?
> Which is larger, 4+2i or 2+4i?
>
> >>> complex(4,2)
> (4+2j)
> >>> complex(2,4)
> (2+4j)
> >>> complex(4,2) > complex(2,4)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: no ordering relation is defined for complex numbers
>
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