Theme
The thread: Two routes to a number — page 5
Essays 97 to 98 of the 98 on this theme, in the same order.
Iterating, instead of factorising
The number that is re-derived
GMRES prints a residual it never computes from its answer either. On the matrix that sends a conjugate gradient recurrence 7.3·10¹⁰ wrong, and on two others chosen to be worse, its number is never more than a factor of 2.86 out — while the basis it is computed from has lost orthogonality entirely. The disease is not iterative methods, and it is not floating point.
Eigenvalues, singular values, rankAn eigenvalue count that cannot be slightly wrong
Every spectral computation on this site returns floats with errors in them. Counting eigenvalues below a shift by the signs of an unpivoted elimination returns an integer, and an integer cannot be 6.9999999997 — so the answer is exactly right, or wrong by a whole eigenvalue, and where the second happens is a band of measurable width.