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Spouge's Approximation - Wikipedia

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134 views2 pages

Spouge's Approximation - Wikipedia

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Tomislav Petrušijević
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13.5.2018.

Spouge's approximation - Wikipedia

Spouge's approximation
In mathematics, the Spouge's approximation is a formula for computing an approximation of the gamma function.
It was named after John L. Spouge who defined the formula in a 1994 paper.[1] The formula is a modification of
Stirling's approximation, and has the form

where a is an arbitrary positive integer and the coefficients are given by

Spouge has proved that, if Re(z) > 0 and a > 2, the relative error in discarding εa(z) is bounded by

The formula is similar to the Lanczos approximation, but has some distinct features. Whereas the Lanczos formula
exhibits faster convergence, Spouge's coefficients are much easier to calculate and the error can be set arbitrarily low.
The formula is therefore feasible for arbitrary-precision evaluation of the gamma function. However, special care must
be taken to use sufficient precision when computing the sum due to the large size of the coefficients ck, as well as their
alternating sign. For example, for a = 49, one must compute the sum using about 65 decimal digits of precision in
order to obtain the promised 40 decimal digits of accuracy.

See also
Stirling's approximation
Lanczos approximation

References
1. Spouge, John L. (1994). "Computation of the Gamma, Digamma, and Trigamma Functions". SIAM Journal on
Numerical Analysis. 31 (3): 931–000. doi:10.1137/0731050 (https://doi.org/10.1137%2F0731050).
JSTOR 2158038 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2158038).

External links
Gamma function with Spouge's formula (http://en.literateprograms.org/Gamma_function_with_Spouge's_formula_
(Mathematica)) - Mathematica implementation at LiteratePrograms

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This page was last edited on 26 December 2016, at 21:12.

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