Computing numerically with functions instead of numbers
Lloyd N. Trefethen · Communications of the ACM · 2015
Science and engineering depend upon computation of functions such as flow fields, charge distributions, and quantum states. Ultimately, such computations require some kind of discretization, but in recent years, it has become possible in many cases to hide the discretizations from the user. We present the Chebfun system for numerical computation with functions, which is based on a key idea: an analogy of floating-point arithmetic for functions rather than numbers.