Approximating the Logarithm of Any Base with Continued Fractions

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Continued fractions provide a very effective toolset for approximating functions. Usually the continued fraction expansion of a function approximates the function better than its Taylor or Fourier series. This Demonstration shows the high quality of a continued fraction expansion to approximate the logarithm to an arbitrary real base greater than 1. It uses the Shanks method and is very efficient due to its adaptability for high-speed numerical computer code.
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Contributed by: Andreas Lauschke (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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To compute the approximation of the logarithm , two sequences of numbers
and
are computed as follows:
,
,
...
.
Then
.
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