Re: mathlib

[Peter Colberg <peter@...>]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 05:35:33PM -0300, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> - sinh, cosh, tanh: (They are quite specialized, on par with several
> other functions offered by external libraries, such as lhf's mathlibx.)

Although I am far from being a mathematician, rather a physicist which
equates to an applied mathematician (and these days far from a physicist,
rather a chemical physicist which equates to an applied physicist),
reading this proposal does hurt a bit.

May I propose to spend just a minute this week gazing in awe at an
image of the Mandelbrot set [1—4] and contemplate how such a visually
complex structure emerges from a simple equation as z(n+1) = z(n)² + c.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Mandelbrot_set_image.png
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Fractal_Broccoli.jpg

The scientists among the Lua users would be grateful to you for
keeping at least the existing mathematical functions in the Lua
standard library, even if (for them) they are trivial to implement.

Peter