Big-Number Arithmetic

New algorithms and further optimized implementation have improved Mathematica performance for computations involving numbers with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of digits. This big-number performance in Mathematica 5 is unchallenged among general computation systems. It is comparable to the performance of special-purpose libraries, in some cases outpacing them too. (Note that most numerical systems cannot perform big-number computations at all, but instead rely purely on machine precision--usually 16 digits.)

The graphic shows performance improvements from Mathematica 4.2 and Mathematica 5 for some example big-number computations.

		Documentation from The Mathematica Book Polynomials Modulo Primes Arbitrary-Precision Numbers Arbitrary-Precision Calculations Arbitrary-Precision Matrices
		Other Links gigaNumerics (Key Technology)