The Mathematics of the Pentium Division Bug
Alan S. Edelman · SIAM Review · 1997
Despite all of the publicity surrounding the Pentium bug of 1994, the mathematical details of the bug are poorly understood. We discuss these details and supply a new proof of the Coe--Tang result that the at-risk divisors have six consecutive ones in positions 5 through 10. Also, we prove that the worst-case absolute error for arguments in [1,2) is on the order of 1e--5.