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How fast can we multiply?

Ivan Van Laningham ivanlan at callware.com
Mon Jul 19 15:35:17 EDT 1999 
Hi All--

Christian Tismer wrote:
> 
> Tim Peters wrote:
>

[bobbit]

> At the same time, the reacton of the list was a little
> disappointing to me. There seems to be near to zero interest.
> Is this the hot summer? Holidays? Bad title of my post?
> 

Oh, bad title, most certainly!  ;-)  *I'm* interested!  I don't
understand most of what you guys are talking about, but I can see that
if I could afford to spend the time studying it I would be rewarded.

On topic, though, doesn't Knuth include in his "How Fast can We
Multiply?" section a discussion of using modular arithmetic to speed up
multiplies by a pretty large factor?  Now, maybe I've misunderstood the
discussion so far so badly that I missed your use of it, but I don't
recall seeing anything about it.

> Then I also had a look into NumPy and its matrix multiplication.
> I stunned. Again no attempt to optimize big O. It could be done
> with Python, the algorithms are known, the fruit is waiting
> to be picked.
> 
> Challenge: I claim Python could be a competitor to Mathematica,
> if only some people were interested.
> 

I would be interested--just not competent!  But a Python version of
Mathematica could indeed be a killer app.  (Or is that a killer rabbit?)

<guess-who-flunked-high-school-algebra>-ly y'rs,
Ivan 
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Ivan Van Laningham
Callware Technologies, Inc.
ivanlan at callware.com
ivanlan at home.com
http://www.pauahtun.org
See also: 
http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html
Army Signal Corps:  Cu Chi, Class of '70
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