a friend posted me the following problem:

inverse tangent is multi-valued and restricts its result to the range -½π to ½π. how can i get back to the original number if it wasn't in this range? obvously thats impossible since from the result you can have no idea, but he added the restriction of it being a positive integer, and thus becomes feasable

my answer was: (inp is the result of the inverse tangent)

while ((inp += pi)-int(inp)>1e-8);

which works up to the limit of numerical accuracy (only works up to about 200 before failing due to numerical innacuracies)

so as an example.

set inp to atan(tan(125)); run the loop, and you get inp=125.000000016

not very difficult at all, but i still found it interesting

Last edited by luca-deltodesco (2008-01-04 02:24:29)