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Issue No.04 - July/August (2005 vol.7)
pp: 67
ABSTRACT
The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge is an entertaining and valuable book that belongs on the shelf of everyone who takes numerical computation seriously. Even the story of how the book came to be is interesting.

The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge: A Study in High-Accuracy Numerical Computing, by Folkmar Bornemann et al., SIAM, 2004, ISBN 089871561X, US$57. The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge is an entertaining and valuable book that belongs on the shelf of everyone who takes numerical computation seriously. Even the story of how the book came to be is interesting. In January 2002, Nick Trefethen published an article in SIAM News in which he posed 10 computational problems, each having a single real number as its answer. He challenged readers to solve these problems, and offered a prize of one dollar per correct digit, up to 10 for each problem, and hence up to a total of$100 for all 10 solved with 10 correct digits each. But Trefethen made one mistake: he assumed that there would probably be, at most, one perfect score and went so far as to say, "If anyone gets 50 digits in total, I will be impressed."
Naturally, the computational science community, sensing that its honor was at stake, responded to the challenge with a great big, "Oh yeah?" In all, there were 20 perfect scores and many more with at least 50 correct digits. Trefethen apparently spent $100 of his own funds, plus another$200 from Oxford Scientific Consulting, to give three of the winners the promised prize. The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge consists of descriptions of how the problems were solved, written by some of the winners. David Bailey provides an interesting foreword.