How can I handle larger powers of 10 like 10^800 in MATLAB?

How can I handle larger powers of 10 like 1E800 in MATLAB?

Answer 1

[Greg Heath]

Use normalization and/or logarithms.

Thank you for formally accepting my answer

Greg

[dinkar]

Hi Greg, Thanks for your response, but in my case I have a lengthy polynomial expression (around 10000 terms) in four vairables along with high powers of 10, as I mentioned previously like 1E800. Now I want to process it with continuation method to obtain solution numerically. I tried Mutilprecision Toolbox, but I ended with faliure (since it was not possible to put "mp" before every variable and powers as MATLAB was showing numerous errors regarding parenthesis missing ). As expression is having lots of addition and subtraction signs, so I think taking LOG will not work and also normalization will give me only powers with negative signs and MATLAB would treat those as zero. Can you tell me other way around. Your help will be appreciated.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

Double precision floating point numbers cannot directly represent such values.

You can use the Symbolic Toolbox or one of the Variable Precision packages in the File Exchange.

[Walter Roberson]

Symbolic toolbox then.