Path: news.easynews.com!easynews!news.he.net!news-hog.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: 71062.1056@compuserve.com (--CELKO--) Newsgroups: comp.databases.ibm-db2,comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: factorial Date: 9 Jan 2002 15:09:58 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 9 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.8.52.210 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1010617799 29151 127.0.0.1 (9 Jan 2002 23:09:59 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 9 Jan 2002 23:09:59 GMT Xref: easynews comp.databases.ibm-db2:53281 comp.databases.theory:19523 X-Received-Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 21:51:05 MST (news.easynews.com) The reason for using the Gamma function is to avoid recursion if possible. A polynomial approximation with an error of less than 3*10^-7 for 0 <= x <= 1 is: Gamma(x+1) = 1 - 0.577191652 * x + 0.988205891 *x^2 - 0.897056937 * x^3 + 0.918206857 * x^4 - 0.756704078 * x^5 + 0.482199394 * x^6 - 0.193527818 * x^7 + 0.035868343 * x^8