Overflow and underflow in multiplication and division (Q1924757)

The authors are concerned with the frequency of occurrence of overflow and/or underflow in scientific computing, in particular, the effect of repeated multiplications and/or divisions. The continuous and discrete models exhibit very similar behavior, generating subsequent distributions which are splines of increasing degree with characteristics similar to those of a normal distribution. The analysis leads to a simple computational model which is used as a basis for the experimental results.