Postby Technomancer » Sun Apr 03, 2005 8:51 am
You'll never find a calculator that has that kind of precision, and you won't need one for any practical application. On the other hand, if you simply mean large numbers with truncated precision you should be able to find one easily. Most scientific calculators will allow numbers up to ~10.0^99 although their actual precision (# of digits stored) may vary.
What sort of applications do you need it for? Some calculators come with all kinds of bells and whistles (plotting, matrices, symbolics, etc) which can add to the cost. Personally, I found the Casio fx-6300G to be sufficient for most needs (it's inexpensive and has graphing/programmable capability) and used my desktop computer for more complicated tasks (IOW I used some mathematics software or wrote the program in C).
The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a "subject"—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.
Neil Postman
(The End of Education)
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge
Isaac Aasimov